WebApp Boilerplate

The WebApp Boilerplate is a frontend/backend JavaScript stack which is comprised of HTML/JavaScript/CSS tools and frameworks for building web applications. You can initialize and create a new project using the scaffold.

Features

• HTML5 Boilerplate helps you build fast, robust, and adaptable web apps or sites. Kick-start your project with the combined knowledge and effort of 100s of developers, all in one little package.
• Grunt is a task-based command line build tool for JavaScript projects.
• RequireJS is a JavaScript file and module loader.
• Express is a minimal and flexible node.js web application framework, providing a robust set of features for building single and multi-page, and hybrid web applications.
• Socket.IO aims to make realtime apps possible in every browser and mobile device, blurring the differences between the different transport mechanisms.
• Redis is an open source, advanced key-value store. It is often referred to as a data structure server since keys can contain strings, hashes, lists, sets and sorted sets.
• i18next is a full-featured i18n javascript library for translating your webapplication.
• Logging with Winston.
• URL routing with Director.
• Role-based access control (RBAC)
• Provides launching of multiple Node.js processes and sharing ports.
• Provides combo handler service using combohandler middleware. You can use it with any other JavaScript or CSS to construct the combo URLs.
• Serves multiple express apps using multihost middleware.
• Unit testing framework integration using PhantomJS with QUnit.
• The Web Service API provides direct, high-level access to the data.
• Includes a sample web using RequireJS, jQuery, Underscore, Backbone and Twitter Bootstrap.

Installation

1. Clone the git repo to your local computer

    $ git clone https://github.com/cheton/webapp-boilerplate.git
   

2. Install NodeJS (0.8.x)

   Click the link to download the Node.js source code or a pre-built installer for your platform.

   http://nodejs.org/download/

3. Install Node Package Manager (1.1.x)

   Click the link to download install script and follow the installation instructions.

   https://npmjs.org/install.sh

    $ curl http://npmjs.org/install.sh | sh
   

4. Install Grunt, PhantomJS, node-supervisor and forever globally using NPM

   It will drop modules in {prefix}/lib/node_modules, and puts executables files in {prefix}/bin, where {prefix} is usually something like /usr or /usr/local.

    $ npm install -g grunt@0.4.x
    $ npm install -g grunt-cli
    $ npm install -g grunt-init
    $ npm install -g phantomjs
    $ npm install -g supervisor     # Use for development
    $ npm install -g forever        # Use for production
   

5. Install Node modules using NPM

   • If you have development related dependencies which you do not want to install in production, specify them using the devDependencies property.
   • On development, using npm install will install dependencies specified in both the dependencies and devDependencies property.
   • On production, using npm install --production will ensure that the development dependencies are not installed.

6. Install Redis to use RedisStore in Socket.IO

    $ yum install redis
   

Quick start

• On development, use grunt dev to perform tasks such as linting and unit testing, and start the app with Node or Supervisor to monitor changes.

    $ grunt dev
    $ NODE_ENV=development supervisor app/main.js
  

• On production, use grunt prod to create a production build. You can create a startup-script or init-script within your /etc/init.d folder, and it can be used to start, stop and respawn processes in the case of an exception crash.

    $ grunt prod
    $ BUILD=`pwd`/build/webapp-boilerplate-{version}
    $ cd $BUILD/site/webapp-boilerplate; npm install --production
    $ cd $BUILD/; npm install --production
    $ NODE_ENV=production forever app/main.js