A3 Starter template

The starter code for creating interactive visualization prototypes.

Getting Started

This repo is set up to use the Parcel bundler. If you don't like the way we've set things up, feel free to change it however you like!

The only restriction is that your final HTML/CSS/JS output must be stored in the "docs" folder so that GitHub knows how to serve it as a static site.

Install

Required software

You must have Node.js installed. I prefer to install it using nvm because it doesn't require sudo and makes upgrades easier, but you can also just get it directly from https://nodejs.org/en/.

Install dependecies

Once you've got node, run the command npm install in this project folder and it will install all of the project-specific dependencies (if you're curious open up package.json to see where these are listed).

npm is the node package manager.

Running the local dev server

To run the project locally, run npm start and it will be available at http://localhost:1234/.

Building the final output

Run npm run build and all of your assets will be compiled and placed into the docs/ folder. Note that this command will overwrite the existing docs folder.

Once pushed to GitHub, the output should be available at UW-CSE442-WI20.github.io/your-repo-name/

Other notes

Using 3rd party libraries

You are more than welcome to use open source packages such as D3.js, just make sure to cite these.

To add a new one run npm install --save <library-name>, e.g. npm install --save d3. This will add the library locally so it is available for use in your JS files. It will also add d3 to the list of dependencies in package.json.

Note that if you install a library your teammates will need to install it too. Once the dep is added to package.json simply running npm install in this directory will download the new dependency.