CODEWITHSUNDEEP
angularjsnode.jsgitgithubsymlink
maxime1992
maxime1992

Reputation: 23813

Nice Git architecture for server / client?

I'm about to start a pretty huge project.

This project is a website.

Backend is going to be an API (which is cool with Angular) but also (later) for an Android app.

Frontend is going to be a fork of this repo : https://github.com/maxime1992/webTemplate and I want to be able to pull from upstream to keep the fork up to date.

I am wondering. How should I manage it?

  1. Should I create only one repo, containing back and frontend with Git submodule or subtree.
  2. Should I create two separated repos, one for the frontend, one for the backend and then use symlink to have them together? But if someone wants to run it on Windows ... Too bad.

I want this project to be open source on GitHub so I would like to have something clear and easy for everyone :)

Tell me how you would do it, what's good, what's wrong ... I'm really curious!

Upvotes: 3

Views: 684

Answers (1)

nwinkler
nwinkler

Reputation: 54467

As indicated in the comments, Git submodules (or Git subtrees) are not the right solution for this. Use a dependency management tool for this, which will work cross-platform (Linux, Mac, Windows), and is the standard way of doing this.

Separating your backend and frontend into separate projects is a good idea, as it will allow you to manage projects independently and add functionality or additional client applications later without bloating your application.

Since you're already using Angular for the frontend, I suggest you take a look at Bower, which is the de-facto standard dependency management tool for frontend projects. It allows you to define a bower.json file to define your dependencies, e.g. Angular and other frontend libraries, allowing you to assemble your frontend project without having to download and store libraries manually.

In your backend project, you would then also add a bower.json file which declares your frontend project as a dependency by pointing to its Git location and branch. Bower will then take care of downloading your frontend project and adding it into your backend project.

Check out some of the popular Bower tutorials for more info on this...

You can use bower link to automatically create symlinks between your projects - this will work across operating systems as well.

Some other tools that you might want to check out:

  • Yeoman for scaffolding a base project. There are some nice generators for scaffolding Angular projects, including things like LESS/SASS and Bootstrap (https://github.com/yeoman/generator-angular)
  • Wiredep for automatically wiring your Bower dependencies into your index.html file.

Getting your initial project setup right will be important. You can start small and grow things to a more advanced configuration later.

Upvotes: 2

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