Polymer App Toolbox - Starter Kit
This template is a starting point for building apps using a drawer-based
layout. The layout is provided by app-layout
elements.
This template, along with the polymer-cli
toolchain, also demonstrates use
of the "PRPL pattern" This pattern allows fast first delivery and interaction with
the content at the initial route requested by the user, along with fast subsequent
navigation by pre-caching the remaining components required by the app and
progressively loading them on-demand as the user navigates through the app.
The PRPL pattern, in a nutshell:
- Push components required for the initial route
- Render initial route ASAP
- Pre-cache components for remaining routes
- Lazy-load and progressively upgrade next routes on-demand
Migrating from Polymer Starter Kit v1?
Check out our blog post that covers what's changed in PSK2 and how to migrate!
Setup
Prerequisites
First, install Polymer CLI using npm (we assume you have pre-installed node.js).
npm install -g polymer-cli
Initialize project from template
mkdir cg-app
cd cg-app
polymer init starter-kit
Start the development server
This command serves the app at http://localhost:8080
and provides basic URL
routing for the app:
polymer serve --open
Build
This command performs HTML, CSS, and JS minification on the application
dependencies, and generates a service-worker.js file with code to pre-cache the
dependencies based on the entrypoint and fragments specified in polymer.json
.
The minified files are output to the build/unbundled
folder, and are suitable
for serving from a HTTP/2+Push compatible server.
In addition the command also creates a fallback build/bundled
folder,
generated using fragment bundling, suitable for serving from non
H2/push-compatible servers or to clients that do not support H2/Push.
polymer build
Preview the build
This command serves the minified version of the app at http://localhost:8080
in an unbundled state, as it would be served by a push-compatible server:
polymer serve build/unbundled
This command serves the minified version of the app at http://localhost:8080
generated using fragment bundling:
polymer serve build/bundled
Run tests
This command will run Web Component Tester against the browsers currently installed on your machine:
polymer test
Adding a new view
You can extend the app by adding more views that will be demand-loaded
e.g. based on the route, or to progressively render non-critical sections of the
application. Each new demand-loaded fragment should be added to the list of
fragments
in the included polymer.json
file. This will ensure those
components and their dependencies are added to the list of pre-cached components
and will be included in the bundled
build.