Front-end code

Building Vue components and scripts

We are moving more and more toward using Vue.js in the front-end, starting with Settings. For building the code on changes, use these terminal commands in the root folder:

# install dependencies
npm install

# build for development
npm run dev

# build for development and watch edits
npm run watch

# build for production with minification
npm run build

Building styles

Styles are written in SCSS and compiled to css.

# install dependencies
make dev-setup

# compile style sheets
npm run sass

# compile style sheets and watch edits
npm run sass:watch

Committing changes

When making changes, also commit the compiled files!

We still use Handlebars templates in some places in Files and Settings. We will replace these step-by-step with Vue.js, but in the meantime, you need to compile them separately.

If you don’t have Handlebars installed yet, you can do it with this terminal command:

sudo npm install -g handlebars

Then inside the root folder of your local Nextcloud development installation, run this command in the terminal every time you changed a .handlebars file to compile it:

./build/compile-handlebars-templates.sh

Before checking in JS changes, make sure to also build for production:

make build-js-production

Then add the compiled files for committing.

To save some time, to only rebuild for a specific app, use the following and replace the module with the app name:

MODULE=user_status make build-js-production

Please note that if you used make build-js or make watch-js before, you’ll notice that a lot of files were marked as changed, so might need to clear the workspace first.