This project is an application skeleton for a typical AngularJS web app. You can use it to quickly bootstrap your angular webapp projects and dev environment for these projects.
The seed contains a sample AngularJS application and is preconfigured to install the Angular framework and a bunch of development and testing tools for instant web development gratification.
The seed app doesn't do much, just shows how to wire two controllers and views together.
To get you started you can simply clone the angular-seed repository and install the dependencies:
You need git to clone the angular-seed repository. You can get it from http://git-scm.com/.
We also use a number of node.js tools to initialize and test angular-seed. You must have node.js and its package manager (npm) installed. You can get them from http://nodejs.org/.
Clone the angular-seed repository using [git][git]:
git clone https://github.com/angular/angular-seed.git
cd angular-seed
We have two kinds of dependencies in this project: tools and angular framework code. The tools help us manage and test the application.
- We get the tools we depend upon via
npm
, the [node package manager][npm]. - We get the angular code via
bower
, a [client-side code package manager][bower].
We have preconfigured npm
to automatically run bower
so we can simply do:
npm install
Behind the scenes this will also call bower install
. You should find that you have two new
folders in your project.
node_modules
- contains the npm packages for the tools we needapp/bower_components
- contains the angular framework files
Note that the bower_components
folder would normally be installed in the root folder but
angular-seed changes this location through the .bowerrc
file. Putting it in the app folder makes
it easier to serve the files by a webserver.
We have preconfigured the project with a simple development web server. The simplest way to start this server is:
npm start
Now browse to the app at http://localhost:8000/app/index.html
.
app/ --> all of the files to be used in production
css/ --> css files
app.css --> default stylesheet
img/ --> image files
index.html --> app layout file (the main html template file of the app)
index-async.html --> just like index.html, but loads js files asynchronously
js/ --> javascript files
app.js --> application
controllers.js --> application controllers
directives.js --> application directives
filters.js --> custom angular filters
services.js --> custom angular services
partials/ --> angular view partials (partial html templates)
partial1.html
partial2.html
test/ --> test config and source files
protractor-conf.js --> config file for running e2e tests with Protractor
e2e/ --> end-to-end specs
scenarios.js
karma.conf.js --> config file for running unit tests with Karma
unit/ --> unit level specs/tests
controllersSpec.js --> specs for controllers
directivessSpec.js --> specs for directives
filtersSpec.js --> specs for filters
servicesSpec.js --> specs for services
While angular is client-side-only technology and it's possible to create angular webapps that
don't require a backend server at all, we recommend serving the project files using a local
webserver during development to avoid issues with security restrictions (sandbox) in browsers. The
sandbox implementation varies between browsers, but quite often prevents things like cookies, xhr,
etc to function properly when an html page is opened via file://
scheme instead of http://
.
The angular-seed project comes preconfigured with a local development webserver. It is a node.js
tool called [http-server][http-server]. You can start this webserver with npm start
but you may choose to
install the tool globally:
sudo npm install -g http-server
Then you can start your own development web server to serve static files from a folder by running:
http-server
Alternatively, you can choose to configure your own webserver, such as apache or nginx. Just
configure your server to serve the files under the app/
directory.
This really depends on how complex is your app and the overall infrastructure of your system, but
the general rule is that all you need in production are all the files under the app/
directory.
Everything else should be omitted.
Angular apps are really just a bunch of static html, css and js files that just need to be hosted somewhere they can be accessed by browsers.
If your Angular app is talking to the backend server via xhr or other means, you need to figure out what is the best way to host the static files to comply with the same origin policy if applicable. Usually this is done by hosting the files by the backend server or through reverse-proxying the backend server(s) and webserver(s).