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vue-ts-hot-reload-example

A bare-bones TypeScript Vue.js project with example webpack configuration that enables hot module reloading with .vue components and TypeScript .ts files.

Features

  • Vue.js .vue single file components that hot-reload
  • Fast TypeScript incremental compilation with hot-reloads
  • Use TypeScript in .vue component files
  • Simple explicit webpack 4 configuration files that are commented and readable so you are able to customize further to suit your needs.
  • Uses latest recommended cli tools webpack-serve for development and webpack-command for building production assets.
  • Bare-bones with the least complexity possible. It doesn't include anything additional such as Vuex, testing frameworks etc. since you might not want to use them.

How to use

  1. Download/clone the project
  2. Run
npm install

or

yarn
  1. Run
npm run dev

and open your browser to http://localhost:8080. Try making changes to the component files and see hot reload changes.

  1. Run
npm run prod

to build production assets which will go to the dist/assets folder

Why?

The latest (as of writing this) recommended way to bootstrap a Vue.js project is using vue-cli. While you can choose to create a TypeScript enabled project with vue-cli, the resulting project's webpack configuration is hidden and modifying it to suit your needs or even trying to understand what it is doing is hard. (See https://cli.vuejs.org/guide/webpack.html)

So I decided to create my own project using some files from the vue-cli generated project as a base and then setting up the webpack configuration files from scratch myself.

If you have setup webpack from scratch before, you will know that getting it to do exactly what you want can be a nightmare. Especially when you want to make hot module reloading work.

Some things to note

  • The project is setup so that you can use VS Code and the Vetur extension for code completion in .vue files for a pretty great development experience. For VS Code, make sure you have the Path Intellisense addon so that @ aliasing works.
  • @ has been aliased to the src path. This has been setup for VS Code, TypeScript and webpack. This allows you to reference components without having to do relative paths all the time. Eg. to reference the About component with an absolute(ish) path, you can do
import About from '@/components/About.vue'
  • Instead of trying to re-use or share common parts of the webpack development and production configs, I have separated them into two (and only two) completely separate independent files: webpack.dev.config.js and webpack.prod.config.js. This makes reading and modifying each config straightforward. You don't have to skip around to different files when reading or modifying the config. And you don't have to wonder if what you are changing for dev will affect production and vice versa.
  • The development config serves a static index.html file. In a real app, the index might be served dynamically from the actual application server. (Unless your app is a pure SPA that can use a static index file.)
  • The production config creates the static assets in the dist/assets folder. In a real app, the application server would read the manifest.json file and generate the correct script/style tags to reference the assets in the resulting response html. (Unless your app is a pure SPA that can use a static index file, then you might want to use HtmlWebpackPlugin to generate the index.)