angular-spotify — the music search apps

Install Dependencies

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.
• In order to run the end-to-end tests, you will also need to have the Java Development Kit (JDK) installed on your machine. Check out the section on end-to-end testing for more info.

We have preconfigured npm to automatically run bower so we can simply do:

npm install

Behind the scenes this will also call bower install. After that, you should find out that you have two new folders in your project.

• node_modules - contains the npm packages for the tools we need
• app/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 web server.

Run the Application

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 localhost:8000/index.html.

Testing

There are two kinds of tests in the angular-seed application: Unit tests and end-to-end tests.

Running Unit Tests

The angular-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 karma.conf.js.
• The unit tests are found next to the code they are testing and have an _test.js suffix (e.g. home_test.js).

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 start watching the source and test files for changes and then re-run the tests whenever any of them changes. 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

Running End-to-End Tests

The angular-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 e2e-tests/protractor-conf.js.
• The end-to-end tests are found in e2e-tests/scenarios.js.

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.

Before starting Protractor, open a separate terminal window and run:

npm start

In addition, since Protractor is built upon WebDriver, we need to ensure that it is installed and up-to-date. The angular-seed project is configured to do this automatically before running the end-to-end tests, so you don't need to worry about it. If you want to manually update the WebDriver, you can run:

npm run update-webdriver

Once you have ensured that the development web server hosting our application is up and running, 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.

Note: Under the hood, Protractor uses the Selenium Standalone Server, which in turn requires the Java Development Kit (JDK) to be installed on your local machine. Check this by running java -version from the command line.

If JDK is not already installed, you can download it here.

Updating Angular

Since the Angular framework library code and tools are acquired through package managers (npm and bower) you can use these tools to easily update the dependencies. Simply run the preconfigured script:

npm run update-deps

This will call npm update and bower update, which in turn will find and install the latest versions that match the version ranges specified in the package.json and bower.json files respectively.

Serving the Application Files

While Angular is client-side-only technology and it is possible to create Angular web apps that do not require a backend server at all, we recommend serving the project files using a local web server 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 the file:// scheme instead of http://.

Running the App during Development

The angular-spotify project comes preconfigured with a local development web server. It is a Node.js tool called http-server. You can start this web server 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 -a localhost -p 8000

Alternatively, you can choose to configure your own web server, such as Apache or Nginx. Just configure your server to serve the files under the app/ directory.

Running the App in Production

This really depends on how complex your app is and the overall infrastructure of your system, but the general rule is that all you need in production are the files under the app/ directory. Everything else should be omitted.

Angular apps are really just a bunch of static HTML, CSS and JavaScript files that 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 web server(s).

Contact

For more information on AngularJS please check out angularjs.org.

or

email me at [email protected]