angular2-mean-starter - rc 4

Make also sure to check the showcase of the app developed with this starter kit. If you want to submit one, just do open a Pull Request headed to the showcase branch.

This is a very neat and simple starter kit for an angular2 MEAN SPA applications. Obviously this won't be perfect for every situation, but I found this really necessary to overcome the fear of the scary blank project and to discover some best practices on how to structure a project. Anyway it shouldn't be too hard to expand it to fit your needs.

What? No Bower? No gulp? No grunt or whatever the hell the people use out there?

No. Npm is fine for all the tasks that a lot of other additional tools can do. JavaScript and CSS dependencies are both installed by npm. The first ones are served by express and the second ones imported from node_modules in the styles.less file. TypeScript is set to compile in es5 and typings are installed properly in the public folder.
Here you won't find any testing packages (TDD, DDD etc.) as much as any other "necessary" tool, I thought that giving just the bare structure with this package, I'd make it more useful, so that you can compose it on your needs.

Installation

1. Clone this repo: git clone https://github.com/giacomocerquone/angular2-mean-starter.git
2. cd into the folder of the repo you just cloned
3. Install npm dependencies npm install
4. You're ready to go, give npm run start to test the application

Built-in scripts (npm as Build Tool)

• npm start - Launch concurrently watchers and server.js through nodemon for live restart
• npm run build - Build all the things that must be compiled
• build:less - Build less files
• watch:less - Watch for changes of less files
• build:ts - Build TypeScript files
• watch:ts - Watch for changes on TypeScript files
• browsersync - Live reload the web page when changes are made on the scripts

What's in here (the stack)

• Node.js (you don't say)
• Angular 2
• TypeScript
• Express 4
• Mongoose to handle MongoDB connections
• Less as CSS preprocessor
• Bootstrap

Development modules

• Nodemon for live server restart
• Concurrently for running and handling multiple npm scripts
• Less-watch-compiler to automatically watch changes to less files and compile them
• Morgan as logging library
• Browser-sync to live reload the browser page

Contributions

I'm really not a genius, probably I'm not even a good programmer yet, but I'm strongly convinced of "learning while doing" so I truly hope for some contributions, advices or anything else you can bring in to improve this starter and to make me a better programmer.

Showcase

Add down here your own project developed with this starter!