Developing a single-page application (SPA) is a popular approach for building modern web applications. SPAs tend to be fast, responsive, and provide a rich user experience (UX).
In this article, we'll show you how to build a SPA with Vue. We'll start by scaffolding a new Vue project using the Vue CLI. Then, we'll create a simple component and wire it up to the Vue router. Finally, we'll deploy our application to Netlify.
The first thing we need to do is scaffold a new Vue project. We can do this using the Vue CLI.
If you don't have the Vue CLI installed, you can install it using npm:
npm install -g @vue/cli
Once the Vue CLI is installed, we can create a new project using the vue create
command:
vue create my-app
The Vue CLI will prompt us to select a preset. We can choose the default preset, which comes with Babel and eslint-plugin-vue, or we can select the "Manually select features" option and choose the features we want.
For this article, we'll choose the default preset.
##Creating a Component
Now that we have a new Vue project, we can create our first component. We'll start by creating a file called src/components/Hello.vue
:
<template>
<div>
<h1>Hello, World!</h1>
</div>
</template>
<script>
export default {
name: "Hello"
};
</script>
<style>
div {
text-align: center;
}
</style>
This is a very simple component that just displays a heading.
Now that we have our component, we need to wire it up to the Vue router. The Vue router is a library that we can use to set up routing in our Vue application.
First, we need to install the Vue router:
npm install --save vue-router
Once the Vue router is installed, we can create a file called src/router.js
and add the following code:
import Vue from "vue";
import VueRouter from "vue-router";
import Hello from "./components/Hello";
Vue.use(VueRouter);
export default new VueRouter({
routes: [
{
path: "/",
name: "Hello",
component: Hello
}
]
});
In this file, we import the Hello
component that we created earlier. We then create a new VueRouter
instance and specify our routes. In this case, we just have one route that goes to the /
path and renders the Hello
component.
Now that we have our routes set up, we need to tell our Vue instance to use the router. We can do this by modifying src/main.js
:
import Vue from 'vue'
import App from './App.vue'
import router from './router'
Vue.config.productionTip = false
new Vue({
router,
render: h => h(App)
}).$mount('#app')
First, we import the router
instance that we created earlier. Then, we tell our new Vue
instance to use the router.
Now that our application is complete, we can deploy it to Netlify. Netlify is a service that makes it easy to deploy static web applications.
First, we need to create a file called netlify.toml
in the root of our project:
[build]
command = "npm run build"
functions = "functions"
This file tells Netlify what command to run to build our application. In this case, we're just running the npm run build
command.
Next, we need to create a file called .gitignore
in the root of our project and add the following lines:
/node_modules
/functions
/.netlify
This file tells Git to ignore the node_modules
, functions
, and .netlify
directories. This is important because we don't want to include these directories in our Git repository.
Finally, we can create a Netlify account and deploy our application.
In this article, we showed you how to build a SPA with Vue. We started by scaffolding a new Vue project. Then, we created a simple component and wired it up to the Vue router. Finally, we deployed our application to Netlify.