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][npm].
• We get the Angular code via bower, a [client-side code package manager][bower].
• In order to run the end-to-end tests, you will also need to have the [Java Development Kit (JDK)][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.

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][local-app-url].

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

The angular-seed app comes preconfigured with unit tests. These are written in [Jasmine][jasmine], which we run with the [Karma][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. view1_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

The angular-seed app comes with end-to-end tests, again written in [Jasmine][jasmine]. These tests are run with the [Protractor][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][selenium], which in turn requires the [Java Development Kit (JDK)][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][jdk-download].

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.