A seed project for custom Four51 Solutions built on AngularJS

Node.js is required for the following node package manager (npm) tasks. If you don't have node.js installed, you can download it here.

$ npm install
$ gulp build

You should now have a few more directories in your project.

OrderCloud/
  |- build/
  |- node_modules/
  |- bower_components/

WebStorm is our chosen development IDE. It provides an interface for the capabilities of the seed projects configuration.

Once you've installed the prerequisites and run your gulp build you can setup and run your Karma tests.

Create a Run configuration using the Karma plugin with the following settings:

Node interpreter: C:\Program Files (x86)\nodejs\node.exe

Karma package: C:\Four51\WebFiles\SPASites\defaults\OrderCloud\node_modules\karma

Configuration file: C:\Four51\WebFiles\SPASites\defaults\OrderCloud\build\karma-unit.js

At a high level, the structure looks roughly like this:

OrderCloud/
  |- gulp/
  |- node_modules/
  |- src/
  |  |- app/
  |  |  |- <application code>
  |  |- assets/
  |  |  |- <static files>
  |  |- index.html
  |- bower_components/
  |  |- <bower components>
  |- bower.json
  |- gulp.config.js
  |- gulpfile.js
  |- server.js
  |- package.json

This section provides a little more detailed understanding of what goes into getting OrderCloud up and running. Though OrderCloud is really simple to use, it might help to have an understanding of the tools involved here, like Node.js and Gulp and Bower. If you're completely new to highly organized, modern JavaScript development, take a few short minutes to read this overview of the tools before continuing with this section.

Here it is:

OrderCloud uses Gulp as its build system, so Node.js is required.

Install the build dependencies locally:

$ npm install

This will read the dependencies (empty by default) and the devDependencies (which contains our build requirements) from package.json and install everything needed into a folder called node_modules/.

There are many Bower packages used by OrderCloud, like AngularJS and the OrderCloud-Angular-SDK, which are listed in bower.js. To install them into the vendor/ directory, simply run:

**This is already installed after running $ npm install

$ bower install

In the future, should you want to add a new Bower package to your app, run the install command and add --save to save the dependency in your bower.json file:

$ bower install packagename --save

The --save flag tells Bower to add the package at its current version to our project's bower.js file so should another developer download our application (or we download it from a different computer), we can simply run the bower install command as above and all our dependencies will be installed for us. Neat!

Technically, OrderCloud is now ready to go.

To ensure your setup works, build your application and then run it with the following commands:

$ gulp build

The built files are placed in the build/ directory by default. And you application should automatically open in the browser window on a localhost!

watch actually starts a few other processes in the background to help you develop your application. Using browser-sync and some built in gulp functions the app is now watching for changes in your source directory. Should you make any changes to your html or js files the app should automatically reload your application with the appropriate changes. Also if you make any changes to your style sheets (less or css) the app will rebuild those changes and inject them directly into the application, without reloading the entire page!

When you're ready to push your app into production, just run the compile command:

$ gulp compile

This will concatenate and minify your sources and place them by default into the compile/ directory. There will only be three files (excluding assets): index.html, OrderCloud.js, and OrderCloud.css. All of the vendor dependencies like AngularJS styles and the OrderCloud-SDK itself have been added to them for super-easy deploying. If you use any assets (src/assets/) then they will be copied to compile/ as is.

Lastly, a complete build is always available by simply running the default task, which runs build and then compile:

$ gulp