Build the HackerNews Reader with VueJS 3 — Part 1
VueJS is rising as one of the most popular front end framework, compared with React (supported by Facebook) and Angular (from Google). Recently, it has been updated to version 3 with many new exciting features. In this post, we will explore the combination with VueX (state management) to handle 3rd party API. To make it simple for the learning purpose, our goal is just to receive the top articles from Hacker News and load it from the client side.
You can try the online demo (opens new window)
First of all we use Vite to scaffold the project. You may wonder why I don’t use the official Vue CLI tool. The reason is Vite is really fast, and in this case I just want to make a quick demonstration. Vue CLI, in other hand, is built on top of the powerful and popular Webpack , will bring you an amazing plugin ecosystem (and it’s compatible with Vue 2). So, now we use yarn (you can use npm instead, just a personal favor, although I prefer the speed of yarn) to create our new web app (requires Node.js version >=12.0.0.)
yarn create @vitejs/app
After enter the command, you will be prompted to choose some selections. Then we cd to your working directory and run following commands to install some tools: VueX (version 4.x), eslint as well as its plugin for Vue and axios.
yarn
yarn add axios vuex@next --save
yarn add -D eslint eslint-plugin-vue
yarn eslint --init
yarn dev
Now, you can open the browser and go to the address http://localhost:3000 to see if the dev server is running.
For the interface, I gonna use Tailwind, and “Vue 3 and Vite don’t support PostCSS 8 yet so you need to install the Tailwind CSS v2.0 PostCSS 7”.
yarn add -D tailwindcss@npm:@tailwindcss/postcss7-compat @tailwindcss/postcss7-compat postcss@^7 autoprefixer@^9
Next, to generate the tailwind.config.js and postcss.config.js files, run:
npx tailwindcss init -p
From the official guide: “In your tailwind.config.js file, configure the purge option with the paths to all of your pages and components so Tailwind can tree-shake unused styles in production builds.”
module.exports = {
purge: ['./index.html', './src/**/*.{vue,js,ts,jsx,tsx}'],
darkMode: false, // or 'media' or 'class'
theme: {
extend: {},
},
variants: {
extend: {},
},
plugins: [],
}
Then create a new file main.css in src/assets/css:
/* ./src/assets/css/main.css */
/*! @import */
@tailwind base;
@tailwind components;
@tailwind utilities;
Then, we need to fetch the data from HackerNews to VueX store first. In the snippet below, I also set up the axios instance, so that we can re-use it later. The API from HackerNews to get top stories only return the IDs, so that we need to fetch each individual item after receiving the arrays.
import { createStore } from "vuex";
import axios from "axios";
const api = axios.create({
baseURL: "https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/",
});
export default createStore({
state: {
items: [],
},
mutations: {
loadItems(state, item) {
state.items.push(item);
},
},
actions: {
loadLatestTopItems(context) {
api
.get('topstories.json?print=pretty&limitToFirst=10&orderBy="$key"')
.then((res) => {
res.data.forEach((id) => {
api.get(`item/${id}.json?print=pretty`).then((res) => {
context.commit("loadItems", res.data);
});
});
})
.catch((error) => {
console.error(error);
});
},
},
});
Next, we create a new component at components/Stories.vue as below:
<template>
<div v-if="items.length">
<div class="rounded-md bg-blue-50 px-3 py-1 my-1 h-auto" v-for="item in items" :key="item.id">
<div class="flex flex-wrap">
<a class="flex-auto font-sans text-black" target="blank" :href="item.url">{{ item.title }}</a>
<div class="text-sm font-medium text-gray-500">{{ item.time }}</div>
<div class="w-full flex-nonefont-semibold text-yellow-500 mt-2">{{ item.by }}</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div v-else>
<svg class="text-red-500 animate-spin -ml-1 mr-3 h-5 w-5" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" fill="none" viewBox="0 0 24 24">
<circle class="opacity-25" cx="12" cy="12" r="10" stroke="currentColor" stroke-width="4"></circle>
<path class="opacity-75" fill="currentColor" d="M4 12a8 8 0 018-8V0C5.373 0 0 5.373 0 12h4zm2 5.291A7.962 7.962 0 014 12H0c0 3.042 1.135 5.824 3 7.938l3-2.647z"></path>
</svg>
</div>
</template>
<script>
export default {
name: "Stories",
props: {
items: Array,
},
</script>
Then add VueX to the main.js
import { createApp } from "vue";
import App from "./App.vue";
import store from "./store";
import "./assets/css/main.css";
const app = createApp(App);
app.use(store);
app.mount("#app");
Finally, we edit App.vue
<template>
<div class="container mx-auto px-4 text-left py-10">
<div class="flex">
<div class="flex-auto">
<h1 class="text-red-500 text-3xl">Latest</h1>
<Stories :items="items"></Stories>
</div>
<div class="flex-auto"></div>
</div>
</div>
</template>
<script>
import { mapState } from "vuex";
import Stories from "./components/Stories.vue";
export default {
name: "app",
components: { Stories },
data() {
return {};
},
computed: {
...mapState(["items"]),
},
created() {
this.$store.dispatch("loadLatestTopItems");
},
};
</script>
Open the http://localhost:3000 and voilà.
Hmm, I forgot the time, we need to make it more readable, instead of a string of numbers. I gonna use the timeago.jspackage to manipulate.
yarn add timeago.js
Then, we add a new method in components/Stories.vue:
methods: {
parseTime(t) {
return timeago.format(t * 1000);
}
},
and implement it in template section:
<div class="text-sm text-gray-500">{{ parseTime(item.time) }}</div>
Reload the page to check the result
The final source code is on Github repo (opens new window). In the next article, we will implement advanced features of Vue components to render them dynamically. I would appreciate to receive any feedback from you guys.
Resources: