I created a small vue.js library that is using scss for styling and published that as npm package. It works well with a default theme included into the package. But what if I would like to provide a custom theme from the application that consumes that npm package, how would you do that?
The source for a very basic version of the library is here: https://github.com/gwildu/gwi-vue-components
The idea is, that you would copy paste the styling folder somewhere (e.g., into your application directory or into another npm package) and configure the library package to import from that copyied directory.
I did some investigation myself and found that there is a big discussion about having dynamic imports in sass since years. This issue (open since 2013) claims to add such a feature (they call it load). Not sure, how actively sass is still developed and when this feature will be supported. For now I see 3 possible solutions:
move to LESS as it supports dynamic imports. Semantic UI gives you a hint about how theming could be done in LESS
It is possible to import from relative paths in SASS. That way you are also able to import from a parent directory of your package root directory (your application directory) like, e.g., #import '../../theme/index';. You would support somewhere in your package an example of a theme that the consumer then would have to copy to, e.g., the root directory of his application and adjust it to his needs. In your package you would then import the theme from that directory in the consumers application folder. The downside is, that the package would not work out of the box
You have a default theme in your package and you add some instructions into the readme how the user can override that theme in a build script. The consumer would have to copy the default theme to his application directory, adjust it to his needs and in the build script he would replace the theme in, e.g., node_modules/your-library-package-folder/theme/ by the theme in your application folder.
To be complete here is the approach with a dynamic import (that is not yet supported by SASS):
In your main theme file in the library package (that would be imported by the components) you would do a relative import of kind of a config file from the consumers application folder like in approach 2 (see above) but that config file yould not contain the theme but only the import path of the theme in a variable. that variable then would be used by the package main theme file to import the theme. For making the library work out of the box, I guess there would be a way to have a default theme as backup if the config file in the consumers directory would not exist (not tested)
Update:
I tried approach 3 but failed to get something useful. The issue with that approach is that you would have to somehow sync your custome theme with the default theme when you update the library to a higher version which might get too complex to handle in a reasonable way. Then I tried to use the overwrite feature of SASS as described here: How to overwrite SCSS variables when compiling to CSS which led me to approach
In your library component you first import a file with possible custom variables and you declare your variables in the library as default.
The issue with that approach is that SASS does not support optional imports. The file with the custom variables have to exist somewhere. So if the library updates you again have to sync your custom theme files for each component / file that was changed in the library. Apparently SASS also don't want to support such a feature in the future: https://github.com/sass/sass/issues/779 which is sad, as it seems to me an essential feature for being able to do theming without a highly complex build step.
Overall, it seems SASS itself is making every effort to prevent a simple theming approach which makes me think of moving back to LESS again. Not having a simple way for static theming in SASS in my opinion outweight the cons of not having an easy way to define custom functions in LESS.
Related
I am trying to add a paintworklet to my application, but I am having a really hard time.
The worklet is a npm dependency, but worklets can't be inlined, they need to be registered like so:
CSS.paintWorklet.addModule('url/to/module.js');
I am having a hard time, because even though that currently works in my application, I am not sure if this is the right way to go about it, or if it will work in production. Currently, my url points to a file inside node_modules and I am not sure if nuxt will do anything with this.
I am currently doing this with a .client.js file inside the plugins folder. But they need an export default function(), but the worklet code does not have an export.
What I am currently trying to do, is tell nuxt somehow to grab certain files from node_modules and serve them as assets somehow, and then reference them some other way. But I cannot find any resources on this.
Any ideas would be appreciated.
If the file path is specified in a literal string, containing node_modules, the paint worklet might appear to work in development mode, but the worklet file will not be bundled in the build output:
CSS.paintWorklet.addModule('./node_modules/extra-scalloped-border/worklet.js')
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
❌ file not bundled in build output
Solution: Import the file
Importing a file enables the bundler to track the file, and include it in the build output. Nuxt 3 uses Vite by default, and the Vite docs describe how to import the file to use with paint worklets:
Explicit URL Imports
Assets that are not included in the internal list or in assetsInclude, can be explicitly imported as an URL using the ?url suffix. This is useful, for example, to import Houdini Paint Worklets.
import workletURL from 'extra-scalloped-border/worklet.js?url'
CSS.paintWorklet.addModule(workletURL)
Since the CSS.paintWorklet API is only available in the browser, make sure to use this in the mounted() hook, which only occurs client-side:
import workletURL from 'extra-scalloped-border/worklet.js?url'
export default {
mounted() {
CSS.paintWorklet.addModule(workletURL)
}
}
demo
Just beginning to learn react native, I am trying to figure out how react native projects are run but am confused at the following code:
import { AppRegistry, Text, TextInput, View } from 'react-native';
I assumed that there should be files like Text.js and TextInput.js in my project folders that will be invoked in the execution. I did find both but they are in different locations. Text.js is in proj_root\node_modules\react-native\Libraries\Text but TextInput.js is in proj_root\node_modules\react-native\Libraries\Components\TextInput. Since they are in different levels of the directory hierarchy, how can the React Native's execution environment correctly find them? From the 'import' instruction I used, I feel confused.
Much appreciated for any help. If there is useful information (books or webpages) to realize how RN projects are run with correct settings, please kindly share. Many thanks for help.
This all relates to how exports are handled in node js environments: simplified, “react-native” points to “[your project’s root]/node_modules/react-native”, and inside that folder (and, in fact, all node_modules packages) you will find a package.json which contains a key “main” : “some-js-file.js”.
I have not checked “react-native” specifically, but generally this “main” key value is “index.js” which would point to node_modules/react-native/index.js. In this index.js file AppRegistry View etc. are exported.
Of course, in the index.js, they are usually imported first using require before being re-exported.
Webpack is pretty handy at handling a lot of these exports and compiling them into production vs dev versions, but the whole idea begins with node_modules folders and package.json files, which points to an index.js. This index.js would usually serve your project the components you asked for above depending on environment, e.g if you are developing it will hand you a Dev version of that component with propTypes that log wanted errors at runtime, or if you building for production it will hand you a Prod version of the component with performance benefits, etc.
Webpack can bundle your code to create such libraries as the ones you see in node_modules folder (such as react-native), and there diferent ways of exporting (e.g. commonjs, amd, umd, global var) but that is really beyond the scope of this question and something to consider if you want to create your own “node_module”.
I am trying to create a plugin that utilizes components from another Vuejs plugin (Vuetify). Basically, I have some common components I want to share across multiple applications with our company.
I thought it would just be a matter of:
Create a github repo for the shared components
Author the plugin
Reference the repo in consuming apps via npm install
Here is the gist of the plugin:
// src/index.js <-- package.json/main is set to "src"
import MyComponent from "./MyComponent.vue";
import * as api from "./api";
export default function install(Vue) {
Vue.component("myComponent", MyComponent );
Vue.prototype.$myApi = api;
}
At the moment, the behavior I'm seeing is:
GOOD
plugin install function is being executed
functions from api attached to Vue.prototype are available in app components
my-component is available in the app and renders markup
BAD
$myApi and Vuetify components are not available in an application instance of of my-component
If I copy the same files into the app and change my import, all works as expected. So, I now wonder if I'm missing something regarding sharing code via external modules.
I've tried these alternatives with the same issue:
use npm link to link the plugin module to the app
manually, use mklink (Windows sym link) to link plugin module to node_modules in the app folder
use a long relative path reference to the plugin module: import MyPlugin from "../../../my-plugin"
I've put this issue off for a while, but for anyone wondering, the issue is with using Single File Components and webpack not compiling those in external modules.
The 2 options I have are:
Don't use Single File Components. I.e.: Just use .js instead of .vue. I've seen some libs like Vuetify.js take this approach
Compile the .vue files in the library module and include them in the source such as ./dist folder.
In Sitefinity WebForms you have a ResourceLinks control allowing you to combine multiple, but what do you use in MVC layouts?
I'm not sure if the razor helper #Html.StyleSheet will do the job?
Adding all the CSS files to the Global folder in App_Data\Sitefinity\WebsiteTemplates[template_folder]\App_Themes[theme] will automatically add them to the site, but won't combine them.
We're working with Sitefinity 8.x and looking for a definitive way to compress and combine JS and CSS, but the pickings seem slim.
With the move from webforms to mvc, Sitefinity didn't include specifically introduce a new bundler or something so you're left with essentially 2 default options, but they've seemed to have opted for approach #3.
1) Use .less and .sass to pre-process as part of your build process.
So in your theme folder you would have a global.less (or scss or sass) that essentially combines them using the #import directive.
Install a VisualStudio extension like Mad's Kristensen Bundler and Minification VS Extension (previously part of WebEssentials) and then define in the VS settings that it should compile and minify on build.
Then every time you build or publish, your one bundled-and-compressed .min.css will be available for Sitefinity.
2) Second option would be to use default ASP.NET Web Optimization.
Where you define static bundles in VisualStudio and then use these bundles by means of #Styles.Render or #Scripts.Render to output them.
3) Lastly a new way has been added with the new Feather approach, which uses the current fashionable approach of Grunt to bundle and optimize your styles and scripts.
In the /ResourcePackages folder you'll already see a gruntfile.js file which has a task you can run which can then compile (and can be extended to prefix, bundle, minify, etc) your .sass into a .min.css which you can then add to your solution.
A sample can be seen here (https://github.com/Sitefinity/feather-packages/blob/master/Bootstrap/gruntfile.js)
I'd use a combination of the above approach to receive the maximum result with Sitefinity where you use option 1 to have VS build out your core/base CSS and JS and then include them using Web.Optimization.
Any additional page or widget related styles or JS can then be included afterwards manually through the css widget which gets compiled through option number 3.
Once you get more familiar with this new approach you can create and load optimized .css and .js on demand - even using a RequireJS approach to load them depended on the widget dragged and dropped on the page. RequireJS might seem out-dated given the latest gadgets and gizmo's but with v9.0 its still being used by Sitefinity itself to add inline-editing functionality.
Let me know if you need more info on option 3, I'm happy to extend my answer with some code snippets, or sample scripts on how I've tailored them.
Could someone explain the right approach in managing assets in Laravel 5?
For example, let's imagine I want to install some plugins using bower. The recommended way, as I got it, to keep all files into /vendor/bower_components. So I got some css, some images, fonts and javascript files withing the plugins.
Also I have a "app.less", where I import everything I need, like #import ('../../../vendor/bower_components/someplugin/somestyle.css'). The problem though that I don't have images/js/fonts in my public directory. Okay, I saw that you can use gulp copy function. However, when the number of plugins is getting higher, how I am supposed to manage where each plugin keeps its pictures or other files?
Actually I wanted to try semantic ui. I've downloaded it with bower. I know nothing about semantic ui, but there is a dist folder with semantic-ui.css. Also there are some fonts files withing themes/basic/assets/fonts. If I just copy it to public, it'll be public/themes/basic/assets/fonts. Then I import semantic-ui.css into my app.les and it'll find necessary fonts. What if I have some other plugins, it'll become unbearable to manage it all.
What is the typical workflow for this problem? The most simple way is just something like put everything into public and include it manually using <link> and <script> tags, but it'll require a lot of queries.
And why it's bad to keep all bower_components inside public? On the analogy of composer, we don't have autoloader for bower, so there is a mess of assets.
You are correct in the recommended place to put bower_components. It's not recommended to put bower_components in the public directory because it contains ALL the files in that specific package, not just the file you need to include in your HTML.
Since your talking about Laravel5, it is recommended to utilize laravel-elixir to manage assets. http://laravel.com/docs/5.0/elixir which utilizes gulp and can compile less, sass or various other files. I don't have any experience with semantic ui, but it looks to be similar to bootstrap. Without a SaaS or Less version available on npmjs.org you would need to copy the necessary files to your public directory. Elixir provides a simple way to copy files or whole directories from bower_components to your public directory.
The easiest way to include all the files needed without a ton of or is to use saas or less.
Personally what I do is this using node
var elixir = require('laravel-elixir');
var nodeDir = './node_modules/'; //This is the node directory(base directory) where all vendor files are downloaded in your case might be different
/*
|--------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Elixir Asset Management
|--------------------------------------------------------------------------
|
| Elixir provides a clean, fluent API for defining some basic Gulp tasks
| for your Laravel application. By default, we are compiling the Sass
| file for our application, as well as publishing vendor resources.
|
*/
elixir(function(mix) {
mix the styles and copy fonts to my public/css folder
mix.styles([
'bootstrap/dist/css/bootstrap.css',
'font-awesome/css/font-awesome.css'
], './public/css/app.css', nodeDir)
.copy(nodeDir + 'font-awesome/fonts', 'public/fonts')
.copy(nodeDir + 'bootstrap/fonts', 'public/fonts');
//mix javascript from node directory and output to public/js/ folder
mix.scripts([
'jquery/dist/jquery.js',
'bootstrap/dist/js/bootstrap.js'
], './public/js/app.js', nodeDir);
});