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01.

Project Setup

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Welcome back you beautiful front-end JavaScript people! In part 1 of our Vue series, we learned a ton of Vue basics and lots more. Now it's time to go further: to get into the nitty-gritty details of building a real app with products, a shopping cart, and a simple checkout form. Whoa. So let's get right down to business.

To truly embrace the Vue goodness, you should definitely download the course code from this page and code along with me. After you unzip the file, you'll find a start/ directory with the same code that you see here. Check out this README.md file for all of the setup instructions.

Starting the symfony Web Server

One of the last steps will be to find a terminal, move into the project and use the symfony binary as an easy way to start a local web server. Do it with:

symfony serve --allow-http -d

The -d is so that it runs as a daemon in the background. It starts a web server at 127.0.0.1:8000 that supports HTTPS or HTTP. I added the --allow-http flag because using HTTP makes it a bit easier to work with the webpack dev-server, which we'll use in a second. We talked about that in the previous tutorial including details on how to use the web server with https.

Anyways, let's go check out the site! Go to http://127.0.0.1:8000

Executing the Encore dev-server

And say hello to... a giant error! Ok, good start! Our site uses Webpack Encore to build its assets... and I have not executed Encore yet.

No problem: back at the terminal, run:

yarn dev-server

This starts another server that will host our compiled CSS and JS files. I like using this because parts of our page will automatically update without us needing to reload. Again, we talked more about this in part 1. If the dev-server gives you any trouble, just use yarn watch instead.

Hello MVP Office Supplies

Now when we refresh... woohoo! Welcome to MVP Office Supplies: our site to sell "mostly functional" office supplies to startups that truly embrace the minimum viable product mentality. All of these products are... barely viable.

Our app is not a single page application: it's designed to use normal server-side-rendered pages for most of the site. We're using Vue just to build a section of our app: this product listing page and, soon, a product show page, shopping cart and checkout.

In the section that's powered by the Vue app, you can already click a category to go to another page. This loads the same Vue app, but filtered to that specific category. We're not using something like Vue Router to avoid full page refreshes, but we will in a future tutorial. It's totally optional.

In our code, all of the logic lives in the assets/ directory and it's organized there into more folders, including one that holds the top-level component for our one page and components/ to hold different small - and sometimes re-usable - pieces. We also have helpers/ and services, which mostly holds AJAX logic. I did reorganize this slightly after part 1 to match the latest standards for organizing JavaScript in a Symfony app.

Ok: for our first mission, it's time to allow a user to click this link and view an individual product page. Will that page be a traditional server-side rendered page? Another Vue app? The same Vue app? Something written in ColdFusion? 3 of those are valid options! Let's talk about them and choose one next.