As a developer, understanding the importance of a robust development environment is crucial for efficient and effective work. This is the reason to take the opportunity to discuss one of the most useful tools for creating Vue.js projects, the Vue command-line tool, Vue CLI. Here’s a comprehensive step by step guide that goes over the installation process and uses Vue CLI.
Vue CLI aims to be the standard tooling baseline for the Vue ecosystem. It ensures the various build tools work smoothly together with sensible defaults, and it provides a robust and ergonomic developer experience.
Installing Vue CLI
The installation of Vue CLI can be divided into two major steps. Firstly, to check if your environment is properly set up and secondly, the actual installation step.
Before anything else, let’s make sure that you have Node.js and npm installed in your system. The versions that you need are Node.js (8.9 or above), and npm (6.0 or above). Here’s the command for checking those:
node -v npm -v
If you don’t have them yet, go ahead and install Node.js which comes along with npm.
Moving on to the actual Vue CLI installation, open up your terminal or command prompt and type in the following command:
npm install -g @vue/cli
This command will install Vue CLI globally on your computer, -g stands for global.
Creating a Project using Vue CLI
After successfully installing Vue CLI, creating your Vue.js project becomes quite easy. To start a new project, run the following command:
vue create my-project
Replace my-project with the name you prefer for your project. This will create a new directory in your current path and set up the project inside it.
Vue CLI UI
Vue CLI also offers a graphical interface to create and manage your projects. This can be launched with the following command:
vue ui
This will open a new window in your default web browser where you can create new projects, and manage existing ones.
When you create a project, whether from the command line or from the graphical interface, you will be offered to choose between two presets: the default one, which includes a set of optimal options for a quick start, and the manual one, which allows you to fine-tune your preferences.
In conclusion, Vue CLI is a very useful tool and a must-have for every Vue.js developer. It saves time during development by preconfiguring the project setup, and its easy-to-use nature makes Vue.js a more accessible framework for beginners.
