README

This repository is for development of applications based on neon and Yii2

Installation

Required Tools

Neon uses Composer to manage dependencies. Make sure you have composer installed.

npm is also required for tailwind usage.

Vendor Folder

The vendor will be saved in your repository once created. This is intentional as experience has shown that user error means composer.lock is less reliable than git in ensuring everyone has the same development environment.

Disk space is cheap especially compared to time wasted dealing with out of step or incorrect vendor updates.

Also tracking of changes and issues caused by 3rd party updates are available in the repo history clearly making for easier fault finding.

node_modules are not normally included in the repo as these generally are for dev activities and not specific to the project. If they are specific and required for the project to work properly, consider including them in the repo.

Composer installation

Run the following command in your terminal to create a new neon project:

composer create-project --prefer-dist newicon/neon-app my-project

Manual installation:

Clone this repository and run composer install.

git clone git@bitbucket.org:newicon/neon-app.git my-project
cd my-project
composer install
rm -rf .git

Applications and Accessing in Code

Applications are created inside the apps folder. The default is main. Neon applications can be accessed using neon()->[app-name]. For example

neon()->dds

to get hold of Daedalus. Methods on the main app can be accessed using

main()->[some-method]

because it has been added to bootstrap.php. If you create additional apps and want those to be accessible in a similar way, add them to the bootstrap file. This will help with intellisense

Templates

Neon uses tailwind css and laravel mix to compile javascript (Vue and Babel) and process css. It uses postcss to compile tailwind css.

The laravel mix file that controls the build process is located themes/default/webpack.mix.js

You will have to install the node dependencies. Goto: themes/default In here run npm install

For development

npm run dev

This will build the css from your tailwind.config.js and the css/main.css into assets/css/main.css Note that a templates assets folder is published and available publicly.

Automatically run the build

npm run watch

In order to automatically run the build when files are changed run

Build for Production

npm run prod

This command builds the css and javascript and creates the coresponding *.min files. For tailwind this will also run purge css which removes all the unused css classes. This step often results in very small css files. Not that the production site will use the minified version. If you forget to check in the minified version you may not see your changes when pushing live.

TODO

Create a npm run hot command that will hot reload when template files / css / js or config files are changed.
Create some reusable components into themes (or base themes) so we aren't always reinventing the wheel.

newicon / neon-app

Maintainers

Details