Aurelia Typescript Boilerplate

A full configured and ready to go boilerplate/skeleton for an Aurelia app
Heavily inspired by Aurelia Skeleton.
_{Made with ❤️ by w3tech, David Weber and contributors}

❯ Why

The skeletons provided by Aurelia are great but aren't ready for an enterprise grade app. This boilerplate provides a lot of features out of the box like i18n or an optin Cordova setup.

❯ Table of Contents

• Getting Started
• Feature configuration
• Bundling
• Running tests
• App configuration
• HTML5 pushState routing
• Cordova - Mobile development
• Docker
• Additional features

❯ Getting started

Before you start, make sure you have a recent version of NodeJS environment >=6.0 with NPM 3 or Yarn.

From the project folder, execute the following commands:

npm install # or: yarn install

This will install all required dependencies, including a local version of Webpack that is going to build and bundle the app. There is no need to install Webpack globally.

To run the app execute the following command:

npm start # or: yarn start

This command starts the webpack development server that serves the build bundles. You can now browse the skeleton app at http://localhost:8080 (or the next available port, notice the output of the command). Changes in the code will automatically build and reload the app.

Running with Hot Module Reload

If you wish to try out the experimental Hot Module Reload, you may run your application with the following command:

npm start -- webpack.server.hmr

❯ Feature configuration

Most of the configuration will happen in the webpack.config.js file. There, you may configure advanced loader features or add direct SASS or LESS loading support.

❯ Bundling

To build an optimized, minified production bundle (output to /dist) execute:

npm start -- build

To build

To test either the development or production build execute:

npm start -- serve

The production bundle includes all files that are required for deployment.

❯ Running tests

This skeleton provides three frameworks for running tests.

You can choose one or two and remove the other, or even use all of them for different types of tests.

By default, both Jest and Karma are configured to run the same tests with Jest's matchers (see Jest documentation for more information).

If you wish to only run certain tests under one of the runners, wrap them in an if, like this:

if (jest) {
  // since only jest supports creating snapshot:
  it('should render correctly', () => {
    expect(document.body.outerHTML).toMatchSnapshot();
  });
}

Jest + Jasmine 2

Jest is a powerful unit testing runner and framework. It runs really fast, however the tests are run under NodeJS, not the browser. This means there might be some cases where something you'd expect works in reality, but fails in a test. One of those things will be SVG, which isn't supported under NodeJS. However, the framework is perfect for doing unit tests of pure functions, and works pretty well in combination with aurelia-testing.

To create new Jest tests, create files with the extension .spec.ts, either in the src directory or in the test/unit directory.

To run the Jest unit tests, run:

npm test

To run the Jest watcher (re-runs tests on changes), run:

npm start -- test.jest.watch

Protractor (E2E / integration tests)

Integration tests can be performed with Protractor.

1. Place your E2E-Tests into the folder test/e2e and name them with the extension .e2e.ts.

2. Run the tests by invoking

npm start -- e2e

Running all test suites

To run all the unit test suites and the E2E tests, you may simply run:

npm start -- test.all

❯ App configuration

There is an app configuration management in place. Two standard environments are already set (development and production). You can for example build the production with:

npm start -- webpack.build.production

If you like to add an additional configuration you have to do the following two steps:

1. Add the configuration json to app/config, example preprod.json
2. Add the corresponding command to package-script.js and pass the right argument like --env.config=preprod

Example for path webpack.build.preprod:

preprod: {
  inlineCss: series(
    'nps webpack.build.before',
    'webpack --progress -p --env.production --env.config=preprod'
  ),
  default: series(
    'nps webpack.build.before',
    'webpack --progress -p --env.production --env.extractCss --env.config=preprod'
  ),
  serve: series.nps(
    'webpack.build.production',
    'serve'
  ),
}

❯ HTML5 pushState routing

By default pushState, also known as html5 routing, is enabled. The Webpack server is already configured to handle this but many webserver need extra configuration to enable this.

❯ Cordova - Mobile development

Installation

Initiate cordova with the following commands:

npm install -g cordova
npm start -- mobile.setup

Run and build

Cordova takes the www folder source to create the Cordova app. This www folder is a symlink pointing to the dist folder. So make sure you run for example npm start -- build first before running/building a Cordova app.

Sometimes the www symlink is removed (e.g. git clone). Run this command to fix this:

npm start -- mobile.link

❯ Docker

There is a Dockerfile using the nginx image to build the docker image.

Getting started

First build your aurelia app with

npm start build

Then build the image with

docker build -t nginx-aurelia .

Then run a container with

docker run --name aurelia-app -d -p 8080:80 nginx-aurelia

Now your website is available with http://localhost:8080.

If you like to update the source do this

docker cp ./dist/. mycontainer:/usr/share/nginx/html

❯ Additional features

This repository houses some additional features which prove to be very useful in projects.

String polyfill

The file utils/polyfills.utils.ts contains a string polyfills. With this polyfill you can do this:

String.isEmpty('Teststring') => false
String.isEmpty('') => true
String.isEmpty(undefined) => true

Validation

The file utils/validation.utils.ts contains some validation helper functions and regex patterns.

The function validateFilledFieldsWithValidationRules us really useful as you can check a object which is already prefilled if it's valid and if not show errors.

The function controllerValidByRules will check if a validation controller is valid.

This could be an example implementation

class FormExample {

  @bindable({ defaultBindingMode: bindingMode.twoWay }) public user: User;

  private controller: ValidationController;
  private rules: Rule<CustomerContactRestModel, any>[][];

  public constructor(
    private validationControllerFactory: ValidationControllerFactory
  ) {
    this.controller = this.validationControllerFactory.createForCurrentScope();
    this.controller.validateTrigger = validateTrigger.changeOrBlur;
  }

  public bind(): void {
    this.setupValidationRules();
    validateFilledFieldsWithValidationRules(this.rules, this.user, this.controller);
  }

  @computedFrom('user')
  public get isValid(): boolean {
    return controllerValidByRules(this.rules, this.user, this.controller);
  }

  private setupValidationRules(): void {
    this.rules = ValidationRules
      .ensure((user: User) => user.lastName)
        .displayName('USER.LAST_NAME')
        .required()
      .ensure((user: User) => user.email)
        .displayName('USER.EMAIL')
        .email()
      .on(this.user).rules;
  }
}

i18n integration

You can pass a translation string into the displayName('USER.LAST_NAME') and it will be translated for you.

Additionally you can translate methods like .required() in src/local/* as demonstrated in the files.

If you use the the method withMessageKey('YOUR.TRANSLATION') you can pass a translation string and it will be translated for you.

Route generator service

If you have router tree like this

     root
    /    \
left      right

You can't navigate from left to right with this.router.navigateToRoute(...) as right is in a branch which left is unaware of. This is due to the injection of the router service.

One solution is to use this.router.navigate(...) but this is unsafe as if the route configuration is changed the navigation is broken as it's hard coded.

The route-generator.service.ts will provide a type safe solution for save navigation.

Check the following files to get an idea how to use it:

• route-generator.service.ts
• app.vm.ts and app.routes.ts
• child-router.vm.ts and child-router.routes.ts

As an example you could navigate like this from left to right

this.routeGeneratorService.navigateByRouteNames(
  { routeName: 'root' },
  { routeName: 'right' }
);

You can also pass route parameters like this but remember that query parameter have to attached to the last element

this.routeGeneratorService.navigateByRouteNames(
  { routeName: 'root', params: { id: '1' }},
  { routeName: 'right' }
);

Class transformer (model handling)

We have included the class transformer which helps creating models (src/app/models/*). This transformation can be done in both direction (rest to model, model to rest).

Dialog service

There is a custom dialog implementation for simpler usage of elements in dialogs.

The Service is named generic-dialog.service.ts and an example can be found in welcome.vm.ts.