Created in 2014, Vue.js is undoubtedly one of the leading frontend frameworks at the moment. With a growing community and expanding ecosystem and it seems it will stay that way for quite some time. I have worked with Vue 2 several years ago for a few projects and I found it a delightful experience.
In a bid to keep up with evolving trends, I figured that now is the time to upgrade my tool-set to the latest version and also with newer tools like Vite and Pinia.
This guide will cover in detail, the steps to create a ‘functional example bookstore single-page application’ using Vue 3 and running it using Vite. It also includes details on how to add, state management using Pinia (the Vuex successor), and routing using Vue Router.
The core concepts that will be covered are:
This may seem like a lot, but I think it’s perfectly possible to go through all of it in less than 20 minutes. Some of the topics listed above could be expanded into entire tutorials of their own, but for now, I will only cover what’s needed to have everything up and running.
One last thing that needs to be mentioned is that the backend is not covered in this tutorial. There is no server-side component per se, although the data is loaded using the browser Fetch API (the successor of XHR), so a backend component could be easily added.
For all accounts and purposes, the application we’ll build here can be deployed as a static website. If you're eager to get right down to coding and you'd like to jump into it right away, you can just get the project up and running with:
git clone https://github.com/beatfactor/middlemarch
npm install
npm run dev
Or fork the project on Github at: https://github.com/beatfactor/middlemarch
create-vite
Scaffolding ToolWe’re going to use the official ‘create-vite’ scaffolding tool to set up the project structure. Make sure you have Node 12+ installed with NPM 6+. They also support Yarn and PNPM as package managers, but we’ll only cover NPM.
The ‘create-vite’ tool will also create the project folder for you, so just make sure to cd into the parent folder first: cd ~/workspace
Install Vite
and initialise the project with:
npm init vite@latest
Then you’ll be prompted to enter the project name and select the library which you want to use.
From the list, choose vue
:
~/workspace % npm init vite@latest
npx: installed 6 in 1.051s
✔ Project name: … vue-bookstore
? Select a framework: › - Use arrow-keys. Return to submit.
vanilla
❯ vue
react
preact
lit
svelte
Then select vue
as the variant, since we’ll not be using TypeScript:
? Select a variant: › - Use arrow-keys. Return to submit.
❯ vue
vue-ts
You should see the following output:
npx: installed 6 in 1.051s
✔ Project name: … vue-bookstore
✔ Select a framework: › vue
✔ Select a variant: › vue
Scaffolding project in /Users/andrei/workspace/vue-bookstore...
Done. Now run:
cd vue-bookstore
npm install
npm run dev
Once we have followed the above instructions, we’ll get the following output from Vite telling us that the app is running:
vite v2.7.7 dev server running at:
> Local: http://localhost:3000/
> Network: use `--host` to expose
ready in 611ms.
Let’s visit the localhost:3000 URL. The welcome page looks like this:
Let’s review the project’s directory structure created by the create-vite
tool:
vue-bookstore/
├── public/
| ├── favicon.ico
├── src/
| ├── assets/
| | └── logo.png
| ├── components/
| | └── HelloWorld.vue
| ├── App.vue
| └── main.js
├─── package.json
├─── README.md
└─── vite.config.js
In this section of our guide, we’ll be adding two new dependencies to our project: Vue-router and pinia. Let’s go ahead and install them from NPM.
Vue Router is the official router for Vue.js. We’ll need to install version 4 which is compatible with Vue 3:
npm install vue-router@4 --save
Pinia is one of the newest projects to emerge from the Vue ecosystem and it’s the new official state management tool for Vue.js apps. Its API is very similar to Vuex (its predecessor) and it is designed to be faster and more lightweight.
You can install pinia from NPM with:
npm install pinia --save
If you’re unfamiliar with state management or routing in a single-page application, don’t worry; both of these concepts are very easy to understand and will be easy to grasp once you see how it works.
Also, remember that we are just building a tutorial here and the goal is to have everything up and running in 20 minutes and that doesn’t require learning all there is to know about Vue.js. It doesn’t even require understanding everything we’ll be doing.
Since we’re building a single-page application here, it might be useful (though not essential) to consider what that means and why is it a single page.
A single page application, simply put, is a web application that doesn’t reload the page when you navigate to another of its sub-pages. Although, the URL of the browser is modified to look as if the page has been reloaded, and that's done using the HTML5 History API.
The scaffolding created using the create-vite
tool adds a very basic Vue component, located in src/components/HelloWorld.vue
. It is then used in the main application component, located in src/App.vue
.
There are two other important files to take note of:
index.html
src/main.js
The index.html file is what the browser sees when it navigates to our application’s page, and the main.js is the entry point for the Vue.js app.
Here’s what these files look like:
index.html
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<meta charset="UTF-8" />
<link rel="icon" href="/favicon.ico" />
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0" />
<title>Vite App</title>
</head>
<body>
<div id="app"></div>
<script type="module" src="/src/main.js"></script>
</body>
</html>
src/main.js
import { createApp } from 'vue'
import App from './App.vue'
createApp(App).mount('#app')
It’s time now to create our application’s main routes. In Vue, every route must correspond to a component. For this application, we’ll consider a component per subpage, like so:
Homepage - our bookstore homepage
Cart - the shopping cart and check out page
Sign-In - the user sign-in page
Since this is only an example, other pages like user sign-up or product detail page, have been left out. Also, the sign-in page only contains a mock sign-in.
For basic HTML and CSS, I’ve also used Bootstrap 5 for things like UI dropdowns and forms, but of course, you can use whatever UI library you want.
We’ll move on to creating empty page components for now so we can set up the routing. The new src directory structure will look like this (after removing the boilerplate code):
src/
├── components/
| └── TopNavbar.js
├── lib/
| ├── router.js
| └── store.js
├── pages/
| ├── cart/
| | ├── cart.css
| | ├── cart.html
| | └── Cart.vue
| ├── home/
| | ├── home.css
| | ├── home.html
| | └── Home.vue
| ├── sign-in/
| | ├── sign-in.css
| | ├── sign-in.html
| | └── SignIn.vue
| └── routes.js
├── App.vue
└── main.js
We’ve added three pages, each of which we’ll keep very basic. We’ll just add TobNavbar
components to make the navigation work without page reloads.
Add the following for src/pages/cart/Cart.vue
, src/pages/home/Home.vue
and src/pages/sign-in/SignIn.vue
:
<script setup>
import TopNavbar from '../../components/TopNavbar.vue';
</script>
<template>
<TopNavbar />
</template>
<style></style>
<script>
export default {
components: {
TopNavbar
},
computed: {},
mounted() {
},
data() {
return {
};
},
};
</script>
The TopNavbar
component located in src/components
will contain just the navigation links.
Notice how the router-link component which is part of the vue-router
appears:
<template>
<router-link to="/">Home</router-link>
<router-link to="/cart/">Cart</router-link>
<router-link to="/sign-in/">Sign In</router-link>
</template>
The pages/routes.js
file contains all the route declarations for the application. Here’s how it looks:
import {createRouter} from 'vue-router'
import Homepage from './home/Home.vue';
import SignIn from './sign-in/SignIn.vue';
import Cart from './cart/Cart.vue';
const routes = [
{
path: '/',
component: Homepage
},
{
path: '/sign-in/',
component: SignIn
},
{
path: '/cart/',
component: Cart
},
]
export default function (history) {
return createRouter({
history,
routes
})
}
Before we’re ready to see the vue-router
in action, we need to do 2 more things:
1) Create the router and add it to the main Vue application instance, in src/main.js
:
import { createApp } from 'vue'
import { createWebHistory } from 'vue-router'
import createRouter from './pages/routes.js'
import App from './App.vue'
const router = createRouter(createWebHistory())
const app = createApp(App)
app.use(router).mount('#app')
2) Add the <router-view>
component in src/App.vue
:
<template>
<router-view></router-view>
</template>
Now re-run npm run dev
if needed and then navigate to http://localhost:3000
where you’ll have a routing-enabled Vue 3 app.
Next, we need to set up the Pinia store for our app. The store is where the application state is maintained.
Pinia is a new project from the Vue.js core team and is now the recommended approach for working with the application state. If you’re already familiar with Vuex, getting used to Pinia will be straightforward. In fact, the Pinia API is slightly easier and less verbose than Vuex.
With Pinia, in a Vue 3 app there is one root store and then any number of individual stores. For our bookstore app, we’re going to use only two stores:
A “Pinia” is the root store that we have to create first and then pass to the Vue instance.
We’ll do that in src/main.js
and update it to look like:
import { createApp } from 'vue'
import { createWebHistory } from 'vue-router'
import { createPinia } from 'pinia'
import createRouter from './pages/routes.js'
import App from './App.vue'
const store = createPinia()
const router = createRouter(createWebHistory())
const app = createApp(App)
app.use(router).use(store).mount('#app')
The next step is to create the individual catalog and cart stores and use them in components.
Creating a Pinia store means two things mainly:z
Like Vuex, the Pinia store contains the state and two types of methods: getters and actions.
Some things to consider about a store:
Getters
are synchronous functions used to retrieve data from the stateActions
are functions that can also be asynchronous which are used to update the statestate
is defined as a function returning the initial state
It’s time now to create the catalog store inside src/stores/catalog.js
:
import { defineStore } from 'pinia'
export const useCatalog = defineStore('catalog-store', {
state: () => {
return {
newArrivals: [],
fetching: false
}
},
getters: {
results(state) {
return state.newArrivals;
},
isFetching(state) {
return state.fetching;
}
},
actions: {
async fetchNewArrivals() {
this.fetching = true;
const response = await fetch('/data/new-arrivals.json');
try {
const result = await response.json();
this.newArrivals = result.books;
} catch (err) {
this.newArrivals = [];
console.error('Error loading new arrivals:', err);
return err;
}
this.fetching = false;
}
}
})
Looking at the above source code, you’ll notice we have two ‘getters’ (results
and isFetching
) and one action (fetchNewArrivals
). Instead of a real backend, we have just a json file located in /data/new-arrivals.json
which contains a few books that we’ll use as our catalog.
You’ll also notice that our ‘getters’ don’t do anything special with the data and so they’re a bit unnecessary, but I they’re included to show how you can define them.
Linking the above definition to a template is also quite straightforward.
Let’s create a new component called NewArrivals
inside src/components/NewArrivals.vue
which we’ll use in the Home.vue
page component.
<script setup>
import {useCatalog} from '../../store/catalog.js'
</script>
<template>
</template>
<style scoped></style>
<script>
import { mapState, mapActions } from 'pinia'
export default {
computed: {
...mapState(useCatalog, {newArrivals: 'results'})
},
methods: {
...mapActions(useCatalog, ['fetchNewArrivals']),
addToCart() {
// we'll populate this later
}
},
created() {
// when the template is created, we call this action
this.fetchNewArrivals();
}
};
</script>
The Home.vue
component becomes:
<script setup>
import TopNavbar from '../../components/TopNavbar.vue';
import NewArrivals from '../../components/NewArrivals.vue';
</script>
<template>
<TopNavbar />
<NewArrivals />
</template>
<style></style>
<script>
export default {
components: {
TopNavbar,
NewArrivals
},
computed: {},
mounted() {},
data() {
return {};
},
};
</script>
Here’s a diagram of how the store and the component work together in the application:
I also wrote a store and a component for the cart but I will not include it in the tutorial. The mechanism is similar and you can inspect the source code in the repository which has everything included, even some extra styles.
Component testing is a type of UI testing where the component is rendered in isolation, and without the rest of the app’s components, for the purpose of verifying its functionality. It’s usually a testing strategy that happens prior to the end-to-end testing step, which we’ll elaborate on in the next section.
We need to install the Vue TestUtils project; the official unit testing library for Vue.js, we need the one that targets Vue 3.
You can install that from NPM with:
npm install @vue/test-utils@next --save-dev
We’ll use Nightwatch.js for both component testing and end-to-end testing. Nightwatch is already one of the recommended testing frameworks by the Vue.js team and was published around the same time as Vue.It has recently gotten support (still in beta ) for Vue component testing through the vite-plugin-nightwatch.
We’ll go ahead and install Nightwatch v2 using:
npm install nightwatch--save-dev
And we’ll also need the vite-plugin-nightwatch
mentioned earlier:
npm install vite-plugin-nightwatch --save-dev
Nightwatch uses the W3C WebDriver API for browser automation tasks and we’ll need to install the chromedriver
NPM package as well, because we’re going to use Chrome to run our tests.
npm install chromedriver --save-dev
And with that, we have arrived at the point where we can finally start writing the actual test for our NewArrivals component.
The vite-plugin-nightwatch
mentioned earlier includes a test renderer page and Nightwatch already contains everything needed for running the initial test for our component.
Create a folder test
and inside it two subfolders:
component
- this will hold component testse2e
- this will hold end-to-end tests
We also need a nightwatch.conf.js
configuration file, but we can run Nightwatch directly and have the config file created for us automatically. Just make sure chromedriver
is also installed (and the Chrome browser, of course).
Make sure the current working directory is the project root and then simply run an example test that is bundled with Nightwatch. We’ll pick the duckDuckGo
test because it’s the fastest:
$ npx nightwatch examples/tests/duckDuckGo.js
The project structure should look like this now:
vue-bookstore/
├── public/
| ├── data/
| └── favicon.ico
├── src/
├── ...
| └── main.js
├── test/
| ├── component/
| └── e2e/
├─── nightwatch.conf.js
├─── package.json
├─── README.md
└─── vite.config.js
We’ll go ahead and create a new file called newArrivalsTest.js
inside test/component
. In it, we’ll add a basic test that mounts the component and checks if the returned element can be found on the page (i.e. the component has been mounted).
describe('New Arrivals Component Test', function() {
it('checks if the component has been mounted', async (browser) => {
const component = await browser.mountVueComponent('/src/components/new-arrivals/NewArrivals.vue', {
plugins: {
router: '/src/lib/router.js'
}
})
expect(component).to.be.present;
});
});
Nightwatch uses the same describe()
syntax as Mocha. You can even use Mocha as a test runner if you’re already familiar with it, but we’re not going to do that for now. In case you’d like to use Mocha, you only need to slip a few switches in the Nightwatch config file and there’s documentation available on the Nightwatch website on how to do that.
It’s time now to run the above test and for that we’ll run Nightwatch using Chrome, like so:
npx nightwatch test/component/newArrivalsTest.js --env chrome
This will open the Chrome browser and render the component, then perform the test. If you don’t like seeing the browser window pop up during the test, you can pass the --headless
the argument, like so:
npx nightwatch test/component/newArrivalsTest.js --env chrome --headless
The test output should look like below:
[New Arrivals Component Test] Test Suite
──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
ℹ Connected to ChromeDriver on port 9515 (652ms).
Using: chrome (97.0.4692.99) on MAC OS X.
Running tests the component:
──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
✔ Expected element <web element{e53f9b1e-11d3-4dc4-8728-4d3cd077343e}> to be present (1ms)
OK. 1 assertions passed. (781ms)
You can of course consult all the CLI options that the Nightwatch runner provides, either by going to the docs pages or by running:
npx nightwatch --help
You may have noticed that our component test isn’t testing that much which means that the test is not as helpful as it could be. So we’ll go ahead and extend it only a little bit.
We’ll just inspect the NewArrivals
component and check if there is a property in it called newArrivals
, which is used in the HTML to render the results.
The test looks like this now. We’ve refactored the component mounting into the before
hook so we can only do the checks inside the test, the it
block. The expect
library is provided by Nightwatch out of the box and it is based on the popular and versatile Chai.js assertion library.
More info on how to use the expect
on the Nightwatch docs website.
describe('New Arrivals Component Test', function() {
let component;
before(async () => {
component = await browser.mountVueComponent('/src/components/new-arrivals/NewArrivals.vue', {
plugins: {
router: '/src/lib/router.js'
}
})
});
it('checks if the component has been mounted', function(browser) {
expect(component).to.be.present;
expect(component).to.have.property('newArrivals');
expect(component).text.toContain('The Memory Police')
expect.elements('div.col-md-6').count.toEqual(4); expect(component.property('newArrivals')).to.be.an('array').with.length(1);
});
});
We are nearing the end of this tutorial but before we can consider we have a working Vue.js app, we need to add support for end-to-end testing and set up a CI pipeline on Github Actions.
Fortunately, we don’t need to insta or configure any other tools, except some fancy reporters, but for now we can get everything we need in terms of end-to-end automated testing out of Nightwatch. Besides Chrome, Nightwatch has built-in support for all major browsers, including Firefox, Edge, and Safari, all thanks to its integration with the W3C Webdriver API and Selenium. It also allows you to use distributed cloud testing platforms like BrowserStack, SauceLabs, CrossBrowserTesting, or LambdaTest.
For now, we’ll keep things less complex and we’ll only focus on writing a few basic automated tests and run them in Chrome, Firefox, and Safari.
Let’s get started with the homepage end-to-end test and create a new file under test/e2e/homePageTest.js
. The syntax is the same as for the component test, but for running the end-to-end tests we’ll use the compiled build of our application.
We can of course run them against the dev build, but the established practice in software development, as far as I can tell, is to run the end-to-end tests in an environment that simulates the production with reasonable precision. This is why they’re called end-to-end tests I suppose, to run them against the end product.
To run the production build we have two options and each of them involves running a Vite
command, which is wrapped in NPM tasks.
npm run build
- this will generate the index.html and the other static assets. You can use this option if you already have a local webserver set up.npm run preview
- this will generate a production build and run it using the built-in dev server, by default at http://localhost:5000
.
The second option is clearly more straightforward and so let’s just run the preview
command and see what happens:
$ npm run preview
> [email protected] preview /Users/andrei/workspace/vue-bookstore
> vite preview
> Local: http://localhost:5000/
> Network: use `--host` to expose
Now that we have a production-ready build running, we can start writing the actual test in test/e2e/homePageTest.js
.
We’ll start small, with just the below:
describe('Homepage End-to-end Test', () => {
it('tests if homepage is loaded', browser => {
browser
.navigateTo('http://localhost:3000')
.assert.visible('#app .new-arrivals-panel')
.expect.elements('#app .new-arrivals-panel .col-md-6').count.toEqual(4)
});
it('adds 2 volumes of "Rhinoceros and Other Plays" to cart', browser => {
browser
.click('.new-arrivals-panel .col-md-6:nth-child(2) button.add-to-cart')
.click('.new-arrivals-panel .col-md-6:nth-child(2) button.add-to-cart')
.assert.textEquals('.shopping-cart .badge', '2');
});
after(browser => browser.end());
});
The test verifies if the New Arrivals panel is displayed on the page and that it contains all 4 entries which we’ve already seen.
To run this in Chrome, the command is very similar to the one for the component test:
npx nightwatch test/e2e/homePageTest.js --env chrome
And the output will be:
[Homepage End-to-end Test] Test Suite
──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
ℹ Connected to ChromeDriver on port 9515 (2454ms).
Using: chrome (97.0.4692.99) on MAC OS X.
Running tests the homepage:
──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
✔ Testing if element <#app .new-arrivals-panel> is visible (157ms)
✔ Expected elements <#app .new-arrivals-panel .col-md-6> count to equal: "4" (18ms)
OK. 2 assertions passed. (765ms)
If we’d want to also run our end-to-end tests in the Firefox browser, we only need to install the GeckoDriver (the Firefox specific implementation of the W3C WebDriver API). No other config is necessary to get it working unless you would like to customize it further.
So let’s go ahead and install it from NPM:
npm i geckodriver --save-dev
And then run Nightwatch with the following command:
npx nightwatch test/e2e/homePageTest.js --env firefox
And the output:
[Homepage End-to-end Test] Test Suite
──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
ℹ Connected to GeckoDriver on port 4444 (1737ms).
Using: firefox (96.0.2) on MAC (20.6.0).
Running tests the homepage:
──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
✔ Testing if element <#app .new-arrivals-panel> is visible (54ms)
✔ Expected elements <#app .new-arrivals-panel .col-md-6> count to equal: "4" (6ms)
OK. 2 assertions passed. (612ms)
If you’re using a Mac, then safaridriver
is probably already installed, depending on your Safari version.
You can check with using:
safaridriver --help
And the output should look like:
Usage: safaridriver [options]
-h, --help Prints out this usage information.
--version Prints out version information and exits.
-p, --port Port number the driver should use. If the server is already running, the port cannot be changed. If port 0 is specified, a default port will be used.
--enable Applies configuration changes so that subsequent WebDriver sessions will run without further authentication.
--diagnose Causes safaridriver to log diagnostic information for all sessions hosted by this instance. See the safaridriver(1) man page for more details about diagnostic logging.
Before running your first test in Safari, you just need to enable automation, with the following command:
safaridriver --enable
And then simply run the Nightwatch test with:
npx nightwatch test/e2e/homePageTest.js --env safari
If you need to run your Nightwatch tests (either component or end-to-end) in more than one browser, you can.
Simply pass the browsers as a comma-separated list (no spaces):
npx nightwatch test/e2e/homePageTest.js --env firefox,chrome
npx nightwatch test/e2e/homePageTest.js --env firefox,chrome,safari
Nightwatch also supports running tests in parallel by dividing the total number of test script files over a configurable number of workers. But since we only have one file for now, we’ll skip this part. More on parallelism on the Nightwatch docs website.
It looks like it’s time to wrap things up and put everything together. Before we can enable continuous deployment in Github Actions, we need to create the test
NPM task.
Now we have both component testing and end-to-end testing in our example project. Of course, it is only at a minimum level so it doesn’t cover everything, but it’s a good start I would say.
The easiest way to tell Nightwatch to run all the tests inside the test folder is to pass the folder as the second CLI argument.
We’ll add that as a new NPM task called test
so let’s edit the package.json
and add the following, inside the “scripts” dictionary:
{
"test": "nightwatch ./test"
}
We can run the NPM task and pass Nightwatch related CLI arguments like so:
npm test -- --env chrome --headless
We’ll use --headless
mode in order to run the tests in Github Actions.
Finally, we can add the Github Actions workflow so that our tests can run on every push and every pull request.
Doing so it’s quite straightforward. We’ll use the Node.js template and add a few new steps in the list, for:
Creating the Github Actions workflow means adding a new file called node.js.yml in the .github/workflows
folder which should look like below. Most of this is auto-generated when you navigate to the Actions section from your Github project and choose the Node.js template.
name: Node.js CI
on:
push:
branches: [ main ]
pull_request:
branches: [ main ]
jobs:
build:
runs-on: ubuntu-latest
strategy:
matrix:
node-version: [12.x, 14.x]
steps:
- uses: actions/checkout@v2
- name: Use Node.js ${{ matrix.node-version }}
uses: actions/setup-node@v2
with:
node-version: ${{ matrix.node-version }}
- run: npm ci
- name: Start vite dev server
run: npm run dev &
- name: Build the app
run: npm run build
- name: Start vite dev server in preview
run: npm run preview &
- name: Run Nightwatch tests
run: npm test
And that's it. A new build will run for each new git push or whenever a new pull request is sent. The build will be run in 2 separate environments, one for Node 12 and the other Node 14, as defined in the workflow definition.
The project is available on Github at https://github.com/beatfactor/middlemarch and all the code covered here and a bit more styling and imagery. It also contains the code for the shopping cart and a mock checkout page.
You can get it running on your local machine with the usual steps:
git clone https://github.com/beatfactor/middlemarch
npm install
npm run dev
Feel free to send pull requests or report issues.
The Vue.js core team provides community support for Vue3, Vite, and Pinia on the following channels:
For support with everything Nightwatch testing related, we have the following channels:
First published here