Elm Prefab

Prefab (Noun)
A prefabricated building or structure that is manufactured in sections, typically in a factory, and then transported and assembled on site to form a complete structure.

Prefab (Adjective) A portmanteau of "Pretty" and "Fabulous" :sparkles:

Elm Prefab is a codegeneration tool for generating and maintaining Elm apps.

It's organized via plugins, where each plugin is independent. You can pick and choose what you want.

• App - A base app architecture that has

  • Page-level state caching
  • Notion-like flexibility for viewing multiple pages at once.
  • Routing generation - Spend as little time futzing with routes as possible!
  • Built-in support for elm-program-test for full end-to-end testing of your Elm app.

• Assets - Be able to link to a static asset

• GraphQL - Write GraphQL queries and mutations and get Elm code to use them! (Powered by vendrinc/elm-gql)

The Elm Architecture is a very stable way to build apps, but there are some nuances to master.

This project is born out of years of experience working on large (>500k lines) Elm apps at Blissfully and now Vendr.

This is for those who want to speed up development for new projects, avoid some tricky situations that can be expensive to fix, and get some super powers along the way 🚀.

Getting started

Generate a new Elm project!:

npx elm-prefab

• Check out an example of what's generated.

Or, if you want to get started more "traditionally":

# navigate to your project directory and install `elm-prefab`
npm install --save-dev elm-prefab

# Running `elm-prefab` will generate working
npm run elm-prefab

Starting the Vite development server

npm run dev will start a dev server using Vite so you can get coding!

Running npm run build will build things for production, with the resultant files in the dist folder. Feel free to check out the ViteJS docs.

The first place to look

elm-prefab has generated src/Page/Home.elm for you, let's take a look.

If you've worked with Elm before it should be pretty familiar as a standard model/update/Msg/view thing.

The next place to look is src/Main.elm.

This is the global part of the app. This is where you can control:

• Global layout, including showing multiple pages in one layout.
• Authentication logic.
• Any other "App-wide" thing you might want.

Now go build something! If you have questions, check out the below guides.

• Adding a new page

• Using local storage

• Managing routes and pages

• Managing assets

• Using GraphQL

FAQ

• Why does this thing exist?
• Why is routing handled like it is?
• Is Elm Prefab a Framework?