Developing with the Intershop PWA requires to download and install Node.js with the included npm package manager.
Check the project's package.json in the engines section for the recommended node version.

Clone or download the Intershop PWA GitHub project to your computer, e.g.,

git clone https://github.com/intershop/intershop-pwa.git

After having cloned the project from the Git repository, open a command line in the project folder and run npm install to download all required dependencies into your development environment.

The project uses Angular CLI - a command line interface for Angular - that has to be installed globally.
Run npm install -g @angular/cli once to globally install Angular CLI on your development machine.

Use ng serve --open to start the development server and open the Progressive Web app in your browser.

icmBaseURL: 'https://develop.icm.intershop.de',

For actually setting up a customer project based on the Intershop PWA, read the Customization Guide.

Local Environment Configuration

The project is configured to support the usage of an own local environment file environment.development.ts that can be configured according to your local development environment needs, e.g., with a different icmBaseURL or different configuration options (see the environment.model.ts for the available configuration options).
Overrides in this file will be included in the theme environments and override parts of it.
For production builds, no overrides should be used.
The Docker build automatically creates this file as an empty file.
The environment.development.ts will be ignored by Git so the developer-specific settings will not be committed and accidentally shared.
It is initially created when running npm install.

The default development configuration is set in angular.json:

"defaultConfiguration": "b2b,development",

Therefore, the B2B related environment file environment.b2b.ts is used when starting the server where further B2B theme-specific configurations are made.
This environment file references two more files:

• environment.model.ts where "ENVIRONMENT_DEFAULTS" are taken from
• environment.development.ts where you can add your own configuration only for the local development environment, see overrides explanation above.

To provide a common environment.development.ts base configuration for projects one can add the file src/environments/environment.development.ts.template to the project sources and pre-configure it for the projects context.
This template will then be used by the initial npm install instead of our standard development configuration.

Development Server

Run ng serve or ng s for a development server.

The local environment configuration will automatically be used if you start the PWA with ng serve.

Once the server is running, navigate to http://localhost:4200 in your browser to see the application.
The app will automatically reload if you change any of the source files.

Running ng serve --port 4300 will start the server on a different port than the default 4200 port, e.g., if one wants to run multiple instances in parallel for comparison.

Running ng serve --open will automatically open a new browser tab with the started application.

Running ng serve --ssl will run the development server with https support.

The development server can be started with different configurations besides the default configuration as well, e.g., ng serve --configuration "b2c,production" or a bit shorter ng s -c=b2c,production.

The different start options can be combined.

Further options of the development server can be found running ng serve --help.

The project can alternatively be run in server-side rendering mode, see Building and Running Server-Side Rendering.

Testing Production Setups

Sometimes it is necessary to boot up a production chain for development to test modifications in nginx or to test the interaction with it.
The easiest way to do this is using Docker Compose with the docker-compose.yml in the project root.
For usage instructions, check the comments in that file.

Development Tools

The used IDE or editor should support the Prettier - Code formatter that is configured to apply a common formatting style on all TypeScript, Javascript, JSON, HTML, SCSS, and other files.
In addition, especially for the file types that are not handled by Prettier, the editor needs to follow the EditorConfig configuration of the project to help maintain consistent coding styles.
Besides that the project has ESLint and Stylelint configured to unify the coding style even further.

The recommended IDE for the Intershop PWA development is

Visual Studio Code = VS Code = VSC

It is a free IDE built on Open Source and available for the different platforms with good TypeScript support maintained by Microsoft.

Within the PWA project we supply configuration files for VS Code that suggest downloading recommended plugins and apply best-practice settings (see the .vscode folder of the project).

If your editor or IDE provides no support for the formatting and linting, make sure the rules are applied otherwise.
For instance, the project provides npm tasks that perform code style checks as well.
Use npm run lint to run a static code analysis.
Use npm run format to perform a formatting run on the code base.

Pre-Commit Check

npm run check is a combination task of lint, format, and test that runs some of the checks that will also be performed by the continuous integration system checks on the whole code base.
Do not overuse it as the run might take some time on your local development environments.

Prefer using npx lint-staged to perform a manual quick evaluation of staged files.
This also happens automatically when committing files with the configured pre-commit hooks for Git.
It is possible to bypass the verification on commit with the Git option --no-verify.

Clean Working Copy

You can use npm run clean to remove all unversioned files and folders from your local git checkout.
This command uses git clean but preserves your environment.development.ts.
Afterwards a clean npm install is performed.

Visual Studio Code Remote Development

An alternative development setup for the PWA is provided when using Visual Studio Code Remote - Containers to work in an isolated pre-configured project development environment.

As prerequisite Docker has to be installed on your development machine.
Furthermore, Visual Studio Code with the Remote - Containers extension has to be used as IDE.

After cloning your local working copy (e.g., with VS Code), VS Code will ask you if you want to reopen the folder in a container.
By doing this, VS Code will prepare the environment for you inside the container.
It installs Node.js LTS, Angular CLI, and performs all required setup steps to get you started in an isolated environment.

Open a console in VS Code and run ng serve to start developing.

Debugging

Tips and tools for debugging Angular applications can be found on the Internet.
As Angular runs in the browser, all the development tool functionality provided there can also be used for Angular (debugging, call stacks, profiling, storage, audits, ...).

Browser Extensions

• Redux DevTools for debugging application state changes
• Angular DevTools for debugging and profiling Angular applications in Chrome
• Angular Augury for debugging and profiling Angular applications in Firefox (no longer maintained)

Tackling Memory Problems

If you encounter problems with JavaScript heap out of memory, you will have to increase the heap space size.
This can be done by setting the environment variable NODE_OPTIONS=--max_old_space_size=8192.

Recommended Articles

Debugging Angular CLI Applications in Visual Studio Code

• How to configure Visual Studio Code for debugging an Angular application.

A Guide To Debugging Angular Applications

• Use tap to log output in RxJS streams. We introduced an operator called log for easier use.
• When inspecting an element in the browser development tools, you can then use ng.probe($0).componentInstance to get access to the Angular component.
• Use ng.profiler.timeChangeDetection({record:true}) to profile a change detection cycle of the current page.
• Use the json pipe in Angular to print out data on templates. Easy-to-use snippets are available with ng-debug and ng-debug-async .

Everything You Need to Know About Debugging Angular Applications

• Provides a more in-depth view about internals.

Debug Angular Apps in Production without Revealing Source Maps

• If you also generate the source maps for production builds, you can load them in the browser development tools and use them for debugging production setups.

Parallelism

The parallelism of npm run test and npm run build:multi can be customized with environment variables.

The environment variable JEST_MAX_WORKERS is deferred to maxWorkers of jest.

The environment variable PWA_BUILD_MAX_WORKERS is deferred to --max-parallel of npm-run-all.