Rails and Vue CLI

• Concept Overview
• Why?
• How it works
• Getting started
  • Install
  • Development
• Deploy in production
• Contributing
• Credits
• License

Concept Overview

This project shows how to build an application with both Rails and Vue CLI in the same repo.

It does not use the Rails gem Webpacker to manage JavaScript and CSS. It's fully delegated to Vue CLI.

Why?

Because sometime you want to use the power of Vue CLI and work with the "classic" Vue ecosystem.

How it works

Rails is only responsible for two things.

1. Serve the first HTML page built with Vue CLI.
2. Expose an API.

In the Rails routes, you can see:

get '*path', to: 'application#index', format: false

And the Application controller:

class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base
  def index
    render template: 'application'
  end
end

It means that Rails will dispatch any requests to the app/views/application.html.erb view. The Vue router is responsible to handle those requests with the correct components after the first load of the page.

For every API requests, we use the :api namespace to serve JSON in the same application that Vue CLI can use.

In the frontend/vue.config.js:

module.exports = {
  // proxy API requests to Rails during development
  devServer: {
    proxy: "http://localhost:3000"
  },

  // output built static files to Rails's public dir.
  // note the "build" script in package.json needs to be modified as well.
  outputDir: "../public",

  // modify the location of the generated HTML file.
  // make sure to do this only in production.
  indexPath:
    process.env.NODE_ENV === "production"
      ? "../app/views/application.html.erb"
      : "index.html"
};

We build the application in the Rails's public dir so it can be served by your Web server on production.

The indexPath is responsible to generate the app/views/application.html.erb that the ApplicationController will use.

In development, we now have two endpoints, localhost:3000 for the api and localhost:8080 for the Vue App.

In production, it works exactly the same way as if you run rails assets:precompile but CSS and JS are precompiled by Vue CLI instead.

Getting started

Install

Development environment requirements :

• Ruby
• Node

$ git clone https://github.com/guillaumebriday/rails-vue-cli.git
$ cd rails-vue-cli

To run the backend

$ bundle
$ bin/setup
$ rm config/credentials.yml.enc && bundle exec rails credentials:edit
$ bundle exec rails s

To run the Frontend:

$ cd frontend
$ yarn
$ yarn serve

Open http://localhost:8080 in your browser.

Development

Lint and fix Vue files:

$ cd frontend
$ yarn lint --fix

Build the image locally :

$ docker build -f .cloud/docker/Dockerfile -t rails-vue-cli .

Deploy in production

You need to build the frontend like you used to do with Webpacker:

$ cd frontend
$ yarn build

Contributing

Do not hesitate to contribute to the project by adapting or adding features ! Bug reports or pull requests are welcome.

Credits

Inspired by:

• https://github.com/yyx990803/laravel-vue-cli-3

License

This project is released under the MIT license.