This derivative of angular-seed is an application skeleton for a typical AngularFire web app. You can use it to quickly bootstrap your Angular + Firebase projects.
The seed is preconfigured to install the Angular framework, Firebase, AngularFire, and a bundle of development and testing tools.
The seed app doesn't do much, but does demonstrate the basics of Angular + Firebase development, including:
- binding synchronized objects
- binding synchronized arrays
- authentication
- route security
- basic account management
Other than one additional configuration step (specifying your Firebase URL), this setup is nearly identical to angularfire-seed.
You need git to clone the angularfire-seed repository. You can get it from http://git-scm.com/.
We also use a number of node.js tools to initialize and test angularfire-seed. You must have node.js and its package manager (npm) installed. You can get them from http://nodejs.org/.
Clone the angularfire-seed repository using git:
git clone https://github.com/firebase/angularfire-seed.git
cd angularfire-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. - We get the angular code via
bower
, a client-side code package manager.
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
angularfire-seed changes this location through the .bowerrc
file. Putting it in the app folder makes
it easier to serve the files by a webserver.
- Open
app/js/config.js
and add your Firebase URL - Go to your Firebase dashboard and enable email/password authentication under the Simple Login tab
- Copy/paste the contents of
config/security-rules.json
into your Security tab, which is also under your Firebase dashboard.
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
config.js --> where you configure Firebase and auth options
controllers.js --> application controllers
directives.js --> application directives
decorators.js --> decorator functions
filters.js --> custom angular filters
firebase.utils.js --> some DRY methods for interacting with Firebase and AngularFire
routes.js --> routing and route security for the app
services.js --> custom angular services
simpleLogin.js --> some DRY methods for interacting with `$firebaseSimpleLogin`
partials/ --> angular view partials (partial html templates)
account.html
chat.html
home.html
login.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
configSpec.js --> specs for config
controllersSpec.js --> specs for controllers
directivesSpec.js --> specs for directives
filtersSpec.js --> specs for filters
servicesSpec.js --> specs for services
There are two kinds of tests in the angularfire-seed application: Unit tests and End to End tests.
The angularfire-seed app comes preconfigured with unit tests. These are written in Jasmine, which we run with the Karma Test Runner. We provide a Karma configuration file to run them.
- the configuration is found at
test/karma.conf.js
- the unit tests are found in
test/unit/
The easiest way to run the unit tests is to use the supplied npm script:
npm test
This script will start the Karma test runner to execute the unit tests. Moreover, Karma will sit and watch the source and test files for changes and then re-run the tests whenever any of them change. This is the recommended strategy; if your unit tests are being run every time you save a file then you receive instant feedback on any changes that break the expected code functionality.
You can also ask Karma to do a single run of the tests and then exit. This is useful if you want to check that a particular version of the code is operating as expected. The project contains a predefined script to do this:
npm run test-single-run
The angularfire-seed app comes with end-to-end tests, again written in Jasmine. These tests are run with the Protractor End-to-End test runner. It uses native events and has special features for Angular applications.
- the configuration is found at
test/protractor-conf.js
- the end-to-end tests are found in
test/e2e/
Protractor simulates interaction with our web app and verifies that the application responds correctly. Therefore, our web server needs to be serving up the application, so that Protractor can interact with it.
npm start
In addition, since Protractor is built upon WebDriver we need to install this. The angularfire-seed project comes with a predefined script to do this:
npm run update-webdriver
This will download and install the latest version of the stand-alone WebDriver tool.
Once you have ensured that the development web server hosting our application is up and running and WebDriver is updated, you can run the end-to-end tests using the supplied npm script:
npm run protractor
This script will execute the end-to-end tests against the application being hosted on the development server.
Previously we recommended that you merge in changes to angularfire-seed into your own fork of the project. Now that the angular framework library code and tools are acquired through package managers (npm and bower) you can use these tools instead to update the dependencies.
You can update the tool dependencies by running:
npm update
This will find the latest versions that match the version ranges specified in the package.json
file.
You can update the Angular, Firebase, and AngularFire dependencies by running:
bower update
This will find the latest versions that match the version ranges specified in the bower.json
file.
The angularfire-seed project supports loading the framework and application scripts asynchronously. The
special index-async.html
is designed to support this style of loading. For it to work you must
inject a piece of Angular JavaScript into the HTML page. The project has a predefined script to help
do this.
npm run update-index-async
This will copy the contents of the angular-loader.js
library file into the index-async.html
page.
You can run this every time you update the version of Angular that you are using.
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 angularfire-seed project comes preconfigured with a local development webserver. It is a node.js
tool called 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/Firebase 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.
Travis CI is a continuous integration service, which can monitor GitHub for new commits
to your repository and execute scripts such as building the app or running tests. The angularfire-seed
project contains a Travis configuration file, .travis.yml
, which will cause Travis to run your
tests when you push to GitHub.
You will need to enable the integration between Travis and GitHub. See the Travis website for more instruction on how to do this.
CloudBees have provided a CI/deployment setup:
If you run this, you will get a cloned version of this repo to start working on in a private git repo, along with a CI service (in Jenkins) hosted that will run unit and end to end tests in both Firefox and Chrome.
For more information on Firebase and AngularFire, check out https://firebase.com/docs/web/bindings/angular
For more information on AngularJS please check out http://angularjs.org/