angular-cn/aio/tools/plunker-builder

Overview

Plunker is an online tool for creating, collaborating and sharing ideas. In AIO we use it to share one or more runnable versions of our examples.

Plunker comes in two flavours. The classic UI and a embedded UI. The latter can be used both in a new tab or embedded within a guide. The AIO project uses the embedded version in both ways.

Plunker generation

Both flavours are created within builder.js. How is a plunker created? What is the process from a directory with files to a link with a plunker.

An "executable" plunker is an HTML file with a <form> that makes a post to plunker on submit. It contains an <input> element for each file we need in the plunker.

So the builder.js job is to get all the needed files from an example and build this HTML file for you.

For plunkers, we use an special systemjs.config that exists in /aio/tools/examples/shared/boilerplate/src/systemjs.config.web.js and we also add the Google's copyright to each file.

Customizing the generation per example basis

How do this tool know about what is an example and what is not? It will look for all folders containing a plnkr.json file. If found, all files within the folder and subfolders will be used in the plunker, with a few generic exceptions that you can find at builder.js.

You can use the plnkr.json to customize the plunker generation. For example:

{
  "description": "Tour of Heroes: Part 6",
  "basePath": "src/",
  "files":[
    "!**/*.d.ts",
    "!**/*.js",
    "!**/*.[1,2].*"
  ],
  "tags": ["tutorial", "tour", "heroes", "http"]
}

Here you can specify a description for the plunker, some tags, a basePath and also a files array where you can specify extra files to add or to ignore.

Classic plunkers and embedded ones

Luckily, both kind of plunkers are very similar, the are created in the same way with a minor exceptions.

To handle those exceptions, we have the embeddedPlunker.js and the regularPlunker.js. Thanks to them, the builder.js is as generic as possible.

Executing the plunker generation

generatePlunkers.js will create a classic plunker and a embedded plunker for each plnk.json it finds.

Where? at src/generated/live-examples/.

Then the <live-example> embedded component will look at this folder to get the plunker it needs for the example.

Appendix: Why not generating plunkers on runtime?

At AngularJS, all the plunkers were generated a runtime. The downside is that all the example codes would need to be deployed as well and they won't be no longer useful after the plunker is generated. This tool takes a few seconds to run, and the end result is only 3mb~.