How to use Javascript or CSS files installed by Composer? - javascript

How do I actually use the frontend files that Composer installs? Specifically JavaScript. I've been able to use a PHP file previously, but JavaScript files are breaking my brain...
I've installed Composer and used it to install a package (Handlebars, specifically). Everything looks like it should. I've got a handlebars folder in my vendor folder and it created a "components" folder with some JavaScript files in it, so I know things are there. I've tried just doing this:
<script type="text/text/javascript"
src="/components/handlebars/handlebars.js"></script>`
But that doesn't seem like what I should be doing and doesn't seem to work anyway. I see there's some require files in there as well, but I've tried referencing them with no luck.
I would hope that just including require __DIR__ . '/vendor/autoload.php'; would do it, but that seems to just bring in the backend stuff.
It seems that Bower may be better suited for frontend stuff like this, but I'm already using Composer for another part of the project, so it would be nice to not have to use two different package managers in one project.

If you are using any kind of front-end buildchain, you can simply point the build-chain to the location of your JS package in vendor, and only put the "built" assets in your web accessible directory (called public in many projects).
If you are not, you'll have to simply either copy or symlink the JS (and/or CSS) dependencies from its vendor path to one that's web accessible. You could automate the process by having a script section in your composer.json. Something along the lines of this (made up, adjust to your actual needs):
"scripts": {
"copyHandlebars": [
"cp vendor/handlebars/dist/css/handlebars.css public/assets/handlebars.css",
"cp vendor/handlebars/dist/js/handlebars.js public/assets/handlebars.js"
],
"post-update-cmd": [
"#copyHandlebars"
],
"post-install-cmd": [
"#copyHandlebars"
]
}
Composer is mainly a PHP dependency manager, and while you can use it to install some frontend packages, usually you'll be better served by a manager build specifically for frontend. As soon as your project reaches a minimum level of complexity, separating the needs of front and back is usually good, since front will have more specific and appropriate tools both to manage dependencies and to build assets.

Related

How can I use a module from npm in a django-admin widget, without installing node?

Background
I have a django app that I want to create an admin widget for. The widget will display text in a particular way (like a terminal). It's so that app admins can see forwarded logs from an analytics process that is orchestrated by django (the app is django-twined).
To do that I want to use something like terminal-kit or one of the other libraries requiring npm install <whatever>
Building the app
The app is built in docker, and I don't want the entire node stack to end up in my production image.
I could use a multi-stage docker build; so install node and a lib from NPM in the first stage, then copy the library from node_modules in the second stage, but this feels unnecessarily slow.
Also, because all I'm doing then is using the raw js static assets that get bundled with the django app, I'm not sure how to go about importing the module (or if this is even possible).
The questions
Can I install an npm module without having the node stack present, and therefore avoid dealing with unwieldy multi stage builds?
How can I then import or require the contents of that module into vanilla javascript to use in a django widget?
Is this even in general possible? If it looks like moving a mountain, I'll give up and just slap a text area with monospace font on there... but it would be nice if log highlighting and colours were properly handled in a terminal-like way.
Can I install an npm module without having the node stack present, and therefore avoid dealing with unwieldy multi stage builds?
You can rollup an npm package using a dev tool like Browserify.
This can be done by rolling up the entire package using something like:
browserify --require terminal-kit
Browserify will parse the package and create a single JS file that you can try loading in the browser. There are some limitations to this so I'd recommend experimenting and exploring the Browserify docs.
How can I then import or require the contents of that module into vanilla javascript to use in a django widget?
You can do this by including a Django template file reference in the backend admin class definition. In the template you'll need to include an html JS source tag that points to the JS script you want to load. Django can include static files when building, you can use that to include the JS file during build time and then a local resource reference to point the template file to the right location.
Is this even in general possible?
Generally speaking this is definitely possible but YMMV. It boils down to the complexities of the npm package and what exactly it is trying to do in the browser.
In steps I would do the following:
Use Browserify to convert the npm package to a single JS file.
Create an html file that loads the local JS file, open this in the browser.
Open the console and see if the commands/context you're hoping to reproduce are working as expected in the browser. You could also write another vanilla JS file and load that in the html file to test.
Include the JS file reference in the Django admin template/widget.
Write custom JS code in the widget that uses/shows the globally instantiated JS script.
This strategy is based off my personal experience, I have had success following this strategy, hopefully it is helpful.

Which folders are useless and which if them are important in ReactJS?

I ran this command to create a ReactJS app
npx create-react-app learningapp
This created several folders now, I dont know which of them are important. I mean I dont know their purpose.
Can anyone explain their purpose in short?
node_modules -- very important, as this will contain all the npm packages and their entire list of dependencies installed.
public -- very important, contains the static files served by your web server.
Index.html -- the index.html file where your react app will inject elements into. I believe this is the only "essential" file.
The other files in this folder will contain logos and manifests if you'd like your webpage to be able to be installed as a mobile app seamlessly. The manifest.json file holds the information about what the app icon and such will look like.
Favicon is the tiny logo you see in your tab title
robots.txt will have the instructions for bots visiting your website. Read about it here if you'd like (https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/bots/what-is-robots.txt/)
src -- very important, will contain your source code. If you want your app to do anything at all, it wouldn't be very wise to delete this folder. If you want to rename this to something else, you can, but you'd have to mess with the webpack configurations. So, not worth the little extra effort. However, you may alter the folder contents.
Unless you want performance monitoring and are writing tests for your app, you can safely delete the test file and the report webvitals stuff. You can make your test files somewhere else too, it doesn't matter if it's here. Just make sure you configure your testing library so that it looks for the correct files.
The rest of the files in this folder can be modified all you like, but try not to touch index.js unless you want to go mess with the webpack configs to change the entry point. Webpack looks for index.js as an entry point to build its dependency tree during compilation.
.gitignore -- this is the files/folders you can tell git to ignore when tracking your folder. A usual candidate for this file is the node_modules folder.
package.json/package.json -- very important, don't directly mess with these unless you know what you're doing. This contains the info about npm packages which your require to run your project properly. A situation where you will need to mess with package.json is when you want to add some custom npm scripts, which is often quite useful.
README.md -- just your readme file which is used to display info about the project on your github repo for example. You can delete it, but just put something on there containing basic info about the repo/ what it does.

Blazor: how to include javascript-package, which is installed with Nuget-Package-Manager?

I'm afraid this will be a stupid question. But I don't manage it to use my JS-Package (for example jQuery), which i have installed with Visual Studio Nuget-Package-Manage in my .net 5 Blazor Server-App.
What i did:
Installing the Package. Here I installed jquery.datatable which includes jQuery itself:
Image of my Project
But now, i don't know how to include it for example in my "_Host.cshmtl"-File:
<script type="text/javascript" charset="utf-8" src="???WHERE IS IT????"></script>
Where is my *.js-File? For example: query.dataTables.js ??
I found it on "C:\Users\xxxxx.nuget\packages\jquery.datatables\1.10.15" and
"C:\Users\xxxxxx.nuget\packages\jquery\1.7.0"
Do i realy have to copy it to my wwwroot-Folder manualy?
If so, why i should use the package-manager?
Thanks for your help!!
Traditional web applications using JavaScript normally load the file from a local folder or from a web CDN (e.g. CDNJS.com etc). This is then loaded from the page (often referenced from a layout file).
Early on it used to be the case that JS libraries could be loaded via NUGET packages but this approach is now discouraged. It had to fix the creation of the script in a set location, e.g. /Scripts and there was no flexibility. Almost all client-side libraries are now in NPM as packages or on CDNs like cdnjs.com.
The current approach for .NET web apps to load client-side assets is either use LibMan or NPM and have some sort of webpack arrangement to compile/pack/copy. You would never load the JS from a /packages folder in the way you suggested.
Blazor Approach
Blazor (since .NET 5.0) can load either embedded JS modules (from your code), or from a URL directly.
If you want to package some JS with your application you should look at Razor Component libraries. This allows static assets such as JS files to be embedded in the code, which Blazor makes available via the _content route, e.g.
_content/LibraryName/myfile.js.
Because Blazor is a SPA you don't include JavaScript using a <script> tag in your HTML, you should load it as a module and reference it there.
This documentation explains it:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/blazor/call-javascript-from-dotnet?view=aspnetcore-5.0#blazor-javascript-isolation-and-object-references
DataTables, JQuery
So should you include jquery.min.js and jquery.datatables.min.js in your library? I'd suggest a better approach is to load from a CDN - your package is smaller and there is a chance the URL is already cached and loaded, e.g.
var module = await js.InvokeAsync<IJSObjectReference>(
"import", "https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/datatables/1.10.21/js/jquery.dataTables.min.js");
This loads the module on-demand from the URL directly. You'd also need to load jquery before this.
Finally I'd make this observation: are you sure you want to go down this route?
There are several native Blazor libraries on NUGET for rendering and handling tables. You'll find it much easier to go this way rather than try to patch jquery-based libraries into a Blazor app.
I had a similar issue. Not with the same libraries, but I was wanting to do something that wasn't available in a Blazor library yet. I needed a video player that could handle a certain format that the default HTML 5 video element can't handle. There is an open source player, videoJS , that did the job, but it's a javascript library. It's available on npm and there are cdn's - however the plugins (as far as I could tell) weren't on CDN - so I had to go down the npm route.
When you install an npm package it puts it into a hidden node_modules folder. Unfortunately even if you point to that path or even copy the file in with your other js files it won't work. Npm packages are designed to be run by nodejs, rather than directly in the browser. In order for them to run in a Blazor app (in the browser) you have to do an intermediary step of transpiling it into a browser friendly format.
What I really wanted was a re-usable component, that wrapped the javascript.
It took me a while to get there but I finally figured it out. I've written a series of articles on my blog detailing it. The final one ports everything into a Razor Class library that can be consumed with no knowledge of the underlying js. The fourth article deals with importing npm libraries and using them within a web assembly app. I'll put the link below but essentially the process is:
Create a folder eg JS and initialise it for npm (npm init -y)
Install the required npm packages (npm install --save)
Create a src folder within the JS folder that that you will put your own js files in
Create an index.js file in src that imports the required javascript modules and exports what you want to consume
Install snowpack (npm install snowpack --save-dev) (or webpack but I found snowpack seems to work better)
Configure snowpack to process the contents of the src folder into wwwroot/js (without snowpack or similar the files in the npm package won't be in a browser or blazor useable format)
use javascript isolation to pick up your index.js file from wwwroot/js
See blog post here for full details (It's part 4 of a 5 part series - part five puts it all in a razor class library so you can add it to a project without ever seeing the javascript)
I know this is late but this SO question was one I kept coming across when searching on how to do what I wanted, so thought I'd put my solution here in case it helps anyone else searching for what I did.

How to use JavaScript NuGet libraries in ASP.Net Core project correctly on the example MathJax?

I installed MathJax library for my site on ASP.Net Core from Package Manager.
I have seen 'MathJax (2.7.0)' in NuGet Dependencies:
Image of My Dependencies
But is it all. When I see wwwroot\lib directory in my project I don't see 'MathJax' folder or something similar in it:
Image of My fron-end lib
But when I need use MathJax I need write something similar in my html-page:
<script type="text/javascript" async src="~lib/MathJax/MathJax.js?config=TeX-AMS_HTML-full"></script>
I can't copy NuGet library directly in wwwroot\lib, because I don't want to add my git repository a lot of files external project (> 36 Mb, > 1500 files). Besides, why use NuGet then?
Also, I can't add existing items of MathJax NuGet library manually (menu Add -> Existing Item...), because they are a lot and the absolute path will not correctly on another PC.
How I can get correctly link on MathJax library in NuGet package?
The JavaScript/CSS library NuGet packages are not for Core. They're for MVC. ASP.NET Core has a completely different approach to static files and client-side libraries than ASP.NET MVC did.
For an ASP.NET Core site, you need to use either LibMan or npm to get your client-side libraries. LibMan is easier, but also very naive and limited. In particular, it only supports libraries that are on cdnjs. While there's a lot of coverage there, it's not comprehensive, and there's some libraries that just are available. I'm not sure whether your particular library is or not.
However, given that you'll almost inevitably end up needing something you can't get through LibMan, and and then you'll be forced to use npm anyways, you might as well just use npm and get used to it. There's more of a learning curve because you also need to create build tasks with something like Webpack, Gulp, Grunt, etc. The npm packages go into a node_modules folder, which should not be served directly. At the very least, you'll need to use Webpack, Gulp, etc. to copy the dist/build of the npm package (i.e. the actual JS/CSS files that you'll be referencing) into your wwwroot/lib directory. There's lots of guides online for how to set this up. Just do some research.
In the VS2019, go to the wwwroot/lib directory, right click and select Add -> Client-Side Library. then include your file.
Go to the web project, right click and go the manage client scripts, then search your library and instal.

Deployment Strategy for Require JS Optimized/Concatenated Website Files

My question is partly technical and partly about deployment strategies and workflow. I built a project using Require JS. It includes a number of distinct js modules, and is built upon Kirby CMS. The directory structure of the project is something like this:
project
assets
styles
style.css
js
scripts
script1.js
script2.js
script3.js
vendor
app.js
images
fonts
content
...
kirby folders
....
The file app.js is called in the footer of my site's page like so:
<script data-main="/assets/js/app" src="/assets/js/vendor/require.js"></script>
It configures RequireJS by calling the requirejs.config() function and then calls the main script file that loads everything else using RequireJS's requirejs() function.
I've used RequireJS' s optimization tool to compile the project in such a way that the optimized files are all dumpted into a directory called dist (a name I just picked up from this tutorial). So in the end dist contains a replication of every directory and file under assets, only optimized, and the file app.js is a concatenated and optimized version of all the js modules that I have in the project. So far so good.
What I am unsure about, however, is how I'm the supposed to make use of this new secondary version of all the code. What for instance if I want to deploy a version of the site to the production server without all the source js files? Each time I deploy the site, I would need to go through my code and in every place that I referred to files under the assets directory, I would need to replace that with dist. I deploy using git and beanstalk. One way to do this would be to manage different branches for staging, production, and development, in which the production and perhaps staging branches have references to the files under dist, but this seems awkward.
So my question is given this kind of optimization set up, which if you look at the tutorial linked above is one way to do this, how then do you manage the switch to the optmized version of everything seemlessly, without having to go back into your code and change everything up? Is there some key part of the process that I'm missing here?
Each time I deploy the site, I would need to go through my code and in every place that I referred to files under the assets directory, I would need to replace that with dist.
I've looked at the tutorial you've linked to and do not see how it is true for the tutorial. The tutorial does not use absolute paths, so should be deployable from dist just as well as from the directory that contains the pre-optimization sources. If you cannot do this for your application, that's because you've done something different from the tutorial. Your script tag, for instance, shows absolute paths.
So the solution is to design your application to avoid absolute paths. This way, you won't have to change paths when you deploy from dist. I'm using this very method to deploy optimized and non-optimized versions of one of my apps.

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