EDIT: Question title changed. The original question title was: Using a relative URL in a Vue app that works in both production and development, but this turned out not to be the cause of my problem (see comments below).
I've tried so many things and all I want to do is use a single relative url in a JavaScript fetch() method and have it run consistently in both development and production without having to change lots of config files or webpack settings.
In a nutshell I want to fetch() a get-users.php file which resides in the same directory as the app — nothing fancy or complicated — just a php file that gets some data from a mysql database on the same host.
I can make it work in development, but then it fails in production (npm run build), OR I can get it working in production but then it fails in development (npm run serve). The reason it fails is essentially because the relative url in production is the root of the dist folder, but the relative url in development is the root of the vue project folder — is that correct?. So in development for example I can use fetch(public/get-users.php) which works perfectly, but then in production the dist folder doesn't contain a public folder so I get a 404 error. I can manually copy and paste the public folder to the dist folder after each build, but this just seems like an unnecessary extra step.
Part of the problem is that I don't fully understand where a file like get-users.php should reside. I don't mind if I have to put it in the public or static folders, but when I do that it fails in production because of the example above. Could someone please explain the role of the public folder in a Vue CLI app please? Does it do something under the hood that I don't fully understand? Am I missing something obvious? It seems like such a trivial task to make this work but I'm banging my head against the wall here! Please help! :)
If you're using vue cli then all you need is to put your get-users.php file inside the public folder and access this file without public prefix like this:
fetch('get-users.php')
This will work as expected for both dev and prod environments because during the build step webpack will copy all static assets from the public to the dist folder.
I have an existing PHP project with jquery and bootstrap, not using any front-end framework.
I am trying to use webpack module bundler in order to create a single entry point for my project resources, manage js dependencies with node js package manager, run tasks as minify js css, image re-size...etc. And improve the browser loading time required to load a single page.
I came across the webpack tutorials and got to install it and install its dev-server, but the problem is that I am not able to understand how I will convert all my current js scripts and css links in the project (where I have a lot of jquery and CSS libraries used to provide multiple features in the project) to use webpack.
Do I have to rewrite all my JS and CSS files in a way that suits webpack? How do I make a successful migration?
Besides, I am not able to run my current php application on the webpack dev-server, is it meant to run there in the first place? It is only listing the directories of the project in the meantime.
I have created a test index.js file and used the following webpack configuration:
var path = require('path');
var webpack = require('webpack');
module.exports =
{
entry: [
'./public/js/index.js',
'webpack/hot/dev-server',
'webpack-dev-server/client?http://localhost:8080'
],
plugins: [
new webpack.HotModuleReplacementPlugin()
],
output: {
path: path.join(__dirname, "public/dist/js"),
publicPath : "http://localhost:8080/my_proj/public/dist/js",
filename: "bundle.js"
}
};
I added the bundle.js to my script loads just for testing as follows hoping that the application will run on the webpack dev-server:
<script type="text/javascript" src="public/dist/js/bundle.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="public/js/jquery.min.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="public/js/jquery.migrate.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="public/js/jquery.bxslider.min.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="public/js/jquery.appear.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="public/js/jquery.countTo.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="public/js/bootstrap.js"></script>
Please help me understand the concept here and how can I make this migration successfully?
First, to answer your smaller questions:
No, you're not supposed to run your PHP application through a webpack dev server. Explained in the Live Reloading section below.
No, you won't have to rewrite your assets. Probably. See the CSS and Edge Cases sections below.
Disclaimer: I'll only take on a small fraction of your question. Its scope is just way too broad to be packed into just one StackOverflow answer.
I will only get in touch with
setting up a development and a production environment for webpack
bundling your first JavaScript
which should give you a foundation to build on.
I'll also mention some things you may want to add and link according resources to read through.
So, let's go.
Requirements
I assume you have Node.js and npm installed on your machine and roughly know how to use them.
I also assume you have webpack and webpack-cli installed as (dev) dependencies of your project (not just globally):
npm install --save-dev webpack webpack-cli
Update: Earlier versions of this answer did not require installing webpack-cli. As of version 4 (February 2018), webpack's CLI resides in its own package, hence the additional required package.
Set up development and a production workflow
You usually want to do stuff differently in development than in production (minifying in production, live-reloading in development, ...)
To achieve that, we'll want to split up our configuration files.
Prepare the directory structure
Let's agree to ignore the webpack config from your question. We'll start all over, we'd have to change almost everything anyway.
First, create a build folder inside your project root. Build-related stuff will go there, since we don't want to pollute your project's root folder with config files. (You're free to name this folder differently, but keep track of that during this tutorial.)
Create a config.base.js, a config.production.js and a config.development.js file inside that folder.
Great, we have config files for two build chains now. The configurations are still empty though, so let's now fill them with some basic logic.
Install webpack-merge
But first, we'll need to install webpack-merge.
npm install --save-dev webpack-merge
This package allows us to deeply merge multiple webpack configurations. We want to use it to create webpack configurations depending on our current environment.
Adjust your configuration
Now adjust your build/config.base.js:
module.exports = {
// We'll place webpack configuration for all environments here
}
The file does obviously just export an empty object right now, but we'll need that for the following steps.
Put this code in your build/config.production.js:
const { merge } = require('webpack-merge')
module.exports = merge(require('./config.base.js'), {
mode: 'production'
// We'll place webpack configuration for production environment here
})
And almost the same code goes into your build/config.development.js:
const { merge } = require('webpack-merge')
module.exports = merge(require('./config.base.js'), {
mode: 'development',
watch: true
// All webpack configuration for development environment will go here
})
I guess it's pretty intuitive what this does:
Using webpack with the config.development.js configuration will fetch the common configuration and merge its own config declaration in.
Update: The mode option in the above config files was added in webpack 4 (released February 2018). It sets a bunch of sensible defaults for development and production bundles.
Now running the process would look like this from the command line:
npx webpack --config build/config.development.js
# If the above doesn't work, you probably have an older version of npm (< 5.1) installed
# While npx is a really great tool, you can of course still call the path of the webpack executable manually:
node_modules/.bin/webpack --config build/config.development.js
...and vice versa for the production environment.
That command is rather clunky to use, but no worries, we'll address that later.
Make some helper files
There are information we'll be wanting to centralize to make them easily exchangeable. File paths are such a thing. So let's extract them.
Create a paths.js in your build folder and have it export some paths we'll want to use later:
const path = require('path')
// I'm really just guessing your project's folder structure from reading your question,
// you might want to adjust this whole section
module.exports = {
// The base path of your source files, especially of your index.js
SRC: path.resolve(__dirname, '..', 'public'),
// The path to put the generated bundle(s)
DIST: path.resolve(__dirname, '..', 'public', 'dist'),
/*
This is your public path.
If you're running your app at http://example.com and I got your DIST folder right,
it'll simply be "/dist".
But if you're running it locally at http://localhost/my/app, it will be "/my/app/dist".
That means you should probably *not* hardcode that path here but write it to a
machine-related config file. (If you don't already have something like that,
google for "dotenv" or something similar.)
*/
ASSETS: '/dist'
}
Create aliases
As mentioned above, we could technically run our build chain in development mode like this:
npx webpack --config build/config.development.js
That's an uncomfortably verbose command though, so let's change that.
It's way more convenient to run your build process via npm scripts. Add one script per environment to your package.json like this:
{
"scripts": {
"dev": "webpack --config build/config.development.js",
"prod": "webpack --config build/config.production.js"
}
}
Now you can run your build chains with npm run dev resp. npm run prod – which is much easier to memorize and faster to type.
...as soon as there'es anything to build, of course.
Bundle JavaScript
Okay, that was actually a fair amount of work without achieving too much so far.
So let's start with something more exciting: We'll define a JavaScript entry point.
Define an entry point
Put the following code into your build/config.base.js (replacing the existing code entirely):
const path = require('path')
const { SRC, DIST, ASSETS } = require('./paths')
module.exports = {
entry: {
scripts: path.resolve(SRC, 'js', 'index.js')
},
output: {
// Put all the bundled stuff in your dist folder
path: DIST,
// Our single entry point from above will be named "scripts.js"
filename: '[name].js',
// The output path as seen from the domain we're visiting in the browser
publicPath: ASSETS
}
}
Create the JavaScript file
The above configuration expects an index.js to live in your SRC/js folder (as defined in the build/paths.js).
Let's create that file with the following content:
import './jquery.min.js'
import './jquery.migrate.js'
import './jquery.bxslider.min.js'
import './jquery.appear.js'
import './jquery.countTo.js'
import './bootstrap.js'
As you can see, the index.js just imports all of the files you want to use.
If you now run
npm run prod
from your terminal, a scripts.js file will be created in your DIST folder. You can include that into your markup with a plain ol' <script> tag.
Congratulations, you've got a working webpack setup!
Dive deeper
This mini-tutorial really just scraped the surface of what you can do with webpack. It gives you a pretty solid foundation for your configuration which you now can fill with whatever you need. And that will actually be quite a lot of stuff.
I'll list a few more things you may want to enhance, with some links to read through.
webpack Concepts
If you want to use webpack, it can be hard to do so if you don't know about its underlying concepts. Juho Vepsäläinen created a great guide on getting started with webpack which helped me a whole lot. He's also a webpack core contributor so you can be sure he knows what he's talking about.
Especially loaders are a concept you'll really need to know.
Many of the hints on this list are also explained there.
Read more: SurviveJS – webpack tutorial
Code Splitting
It does what the name's saying: You might not want to pack all your JavaScript into one bulky output file.
It's a job webpack does for you to split off parts of your bundle which you only need on certain pages of your application.
Also, depending on how frequently you're working on your project's JavaScript, it might be a good idea to split off third party code from your bundle for caching purposes.
Read more: webpack Documentation – Code Splitting
Caching
You may want to enhance your site's caching behaviour by adding a hash to your bundled file names which depends on their content. This will create (for example) a script.31aa1d3cad014475a618.js instead of a scripts.js.
That file can then be cached indefinitely because as soon as its contents change, the file name will change as well.
Your PHP code might then use the webpack-manifest-plugin to gain access to the generated file names.
Read more:
Immutable Caching on how to cache your bundles forever
webpack Documentation – chunkhash on how to enrich your bundle file names with hashes
webpack-manifest-plugin on how to generate a manifest.json containing the file names of your current bundle
Transpiling
In case you want to use modern ES2015 code in your site's JavaScript (and are targeting non-evergreen browsers), you'll want to transpile them down to regular ES5. (If the term "ES2015" does not make any sense to you, you're most likely not using it and can ignore this paragraph.)
Read more: babel-loader – A loader that runs Babel on your scripts
CSS
There are webpack loaders for CSS. And Sass. And PostCSS. Whatever you need.
And since you're probably not planning to include your CSS via <script> tags, get to know the Extract Text Plugin to generate actual .css files.
Update: The Extract Text Plugin is very established. However, it's actually a kind of hack: It generates .css files even though webpack only knows JavaScript as its target language.
However, this is no longer true as of webpack 4. There's now a system to define arbitrary module types, including CSS.
Long story short: Expect native CSS support in webpack to replace Extract Text Plugin some time soon.
Hint: Paths
I'll mention this because this was a real pain point for me until I realized how webpack works here:
Be aware that webpack will recognize your url(...) statements and try to resolve them relative to your source files.
This means, your source file public/css/main.css:
body {
background: url('../img/bg.jpg');
}
if your output path is public/dist/css/bundle.css, will be transformed to:
body {
background: url('../../img/bg.jpg');
}
Read more:
style-loader and css-loader – you'll hands down need those.
extract-text-webpack-plugin
Minifying
Update: Since webpack 4 was released in February 2018, this section is rather obsolete. Setting the new mode option to "production" now automatically applies JavaScript minification.
There is a Terser plugin for webpack to minify your JavaScript. Minifying CSS is a feature already builtin to the css-loader plugin mentioned above.
Read more: Terser webpack Plugin
Image Optimization
webpack is a bundler, not a task runner. Thus, image optimization is not a genuine webpack task. You'd probably be better off using an actual task runner or just defining some npm scripts for this.
This does not mean webpack is not capable of doing this. There are plugins for pretty much everything.
Read more:
imagemin can minify images pretty nicely on its own.
imagemin-webpack-plugin will integrate that process into your webpack build chain.
Live Reloading
Your problems with live reloading have a pretty simple cause: a webpack dev server is just a simple Node.js server serving only static files.
For you're case, webpack-dev-server probably is the wrong tool at all. Try webpack-livereload-plugin instead for a live reloader that you can just include via <script> tag.
Read more: webpack-livereload-plugin
Source Maps
Update: As of webpack 4 (released in February 2018), source maps are automatically generated when the new mode option is set to "development".
By all means, use source maps. They'll make your work with bundles so much easier you'll want to cry.
Read more: webpack Documentation – Source Maps
Edge Cases
Usually, all your existing scripts you'll process with webpack should be running just fine.
The only exception that comes to my mind right now would be regarding global entities.
Look at the following code:
function myFunc () {
console.log('I exist!')
}
This code in a plain JavaScript file would make myFunc available everywhere in your JS code. But since webpack bundle code is wrapped inside callback functions (and thus leaving the global scope), there won't be any access to that function anymore.
Third party libraries should not be a problem there, they usually assign their globals to the window object directly, but if you've already written JS code in your project, you should be aware of that.
Automate!
You'll want to automate as much of your workflow as possible.
Consider running npm run prod via a git hook before pushing / after pulling.
Based on the existing vue-templates and and the answer from #Loilo I made a vue template you can install with vue-cli. This template jumpstarts you for a vue application you can extend with or integrate in you existing environment.
npm install -g vue-cli
vue init delcon/webpack-simple my-project
cd my-project
npm install
devwatch:
This template has an additional run devwatch option that watches for filechanges instead of using the webpack-dev-server. This makes it usable for any existing webserver enviroment.
npm run devwatch
dev:
to run it with the default webpack-dev-server, remove <script src="http://localhost:35729/livereload.js"></script> in index.html:
npm run dev
build:
to build your project for production:
npm run build
We use CakePHP 2.7.9 and Minify plugin on a CentOS server running Apache 2.2.
https://github.com/maurymmarques/minify-cakephp
The plugin works fine and now we can minify css files like this.
echo $this->Minify->css(array('default', 'global'));
The code above generates URL like this.
http://example.com/min-css?f=default.css,global.css
And now we want to deny access to original files under webroot/css. How can it be done in CakePHP? We want to return 404 or 401 or something like that for direct URL access like this.
http://example.com/css/default.css
And now we want to deny access to original files under webroot/css
Simply don't but non public code and files into the public webroot. It's not recommended in any case. Point your minifier to the files and set its output folder to webroot.
We use task runners and keep the minification code outside of the actual app. This is stuff that doesn't belong into the application itself - IMHO.
We use php Robo and on the JS side Gulp for minification and automatically trigger the tasks on deployment. All our SCSS and JS files are outside of the webroot. We have just a few asset includes in our app code and they almost never change. Robo and Gulp have watchers that rewrite the asset files as we change them on when the app is deployed it automatically generates minified files.
I'll try my best to be clear with my question, but please, bear with me if there's something obscure.
I'm developing a few PHP web projects. They all share some common code - let's call it a "framework" for the sake of brevity. So I came to the conclusion that it's best to move the framework out of the project directory. In other words, this is what I have now:
www
|--framework
|--project1
|--project2
|--project3
This works as long as I only need to include PHP scripts. In fact, functions like require and include use the physical address of a file, and can easily be pointed to the framework using require_once("../framework/file.php").
However, in the framework directory there are also some resources: Javascript files, some functional CSS, and so on. For example, assume jQuery's file is inside the framework dir; how would I include it? <script src="../framework/jquery.min.js"></script> doesn't work, because a URL like http://example.com/../framework/jquery.min.js is considered invalid.
A not-so-cool workaround that crossed my mind is to use mod_rewrite to redirect all requests for framework URLs to a "framework include script", a special PHP script that would catch the right file and return its contents. It could work, but it seems pretty much an ugly solution to me.
I regularily do that by using symlinks:
If you have shell access to the server run ln -s ../framework/ . inside each project directory
if you do not have shell access, run <?php symlink('../framework', './framework'); ?> once inside every project direcory.
EDIT
You would then use <script src="framework/jquery.min.js"></script> respe. <?php include 'framework/something.php'; ?> to include the framework scripts.
I have installed zend framework on my local machine. I have configured a vhost in httpd.conf and have added a line in my hosts file (127.0.0.1 mysite). I am running windows 7. Everything works perfect. The problem is when i upload on a hosting server the paths get mixed up.
I am uploading on a remote dir called zf-framework. To access the index page i need to type this url: http://mysite/zf-framework/public. It displays the index page but when i press any links on the page they get mixed up and end up being something like http://mysite/controller/action when in fact it should be http://mysite/zf-framework/public/controller/action. I have found a work-around for this situation...to use echo $this->baseUrl(link) for any links i have in the layout.phtml. The problem is more serious when it comes to submitting forms. I can't use baseUrl there....or i don't know how to use it. Is there a way to write some general config stuff so that this could be automatically resolved by the framework. Let's say to write something in index.php or bootstrap.php that will fix the paths automatically?
If you're using Zend_Application, then add the following to your configs/application.ini file.
resources.frontController.baseUrl = "/your-path-here"
If you're not using Zend_Application, then do this in your bootstrap, or index.php file.
$front = Zend_Controller_Front::getInstance();
$front->setBaseUrl('/your-path-here');
You won't have to use $this->baseUrl() when submitting a form to the same action and controller (just leave out the action attribute in the form tag), or when using the Redirector action helper. However, links in your view scripts will require you to $this->baseUrl('/url-without-base'), which doesn't seem too bad to me.
I am not 100% on this, but if you specify the route in your routes.ini as zf-framework/public/Controller/Action etc this should fix your issue.
I would see this as a bandaid, but I am not 100% sure on how to properly fix your issue other then you modifying the vhosts file on the remote server to set a document root to the public folder. If that is not an option, well the above should work, but know that all of your files are potentially accessible from everyone (at least your folder structure). I am not sure what harm this can do (if any) other then if your database schema is in the /data directory.
It is better to try and get the public set as the web root, if possible.