VueJS

Introducing the New Nuxt 2 - Pinia - Tailwind Kit in Starter.dev

Published Dec 14, 2022

Updated Feb 16, 2023

4 min read

This article was written over 18 months ago and may contain information that is out of date. Some content may be relevant but please refer to the relevant official documentation or available resources for the latest information.

Starter.dev is an open source community resource developed by This Dot Labs that provides code starter kits in a variety of web technologies, including React, Angular, Vue, etc. with the hope of enabling developers to bootstrap their projects quickly without having to spend time configuring tooling. We ship starter kits with showcases to demonstrate how to best utilize these kits, and structure more complex projects.

We are excited to announce our new starter.dev kit: a Nuxt 2 kit with Pinia as the state manager, and Tailwind for the styling.

Ok, you might be thinking: "Why should I use a Nuxt 2 kit if Nuxt 3 is just around the corner?" Well, although Nuxt 2 is indeed in just maintenance mode by now, it is the most stable Nuxt version out there, and it is still really powerful, and a great framework for you next app. If you want to build a scalable and stable project, you might want to build it in this version!

Ok, without any further ado, let’s see what this kit is all about, and how you can use it in your next application! Lets first talk about our technological options.

Nuxt

So why Nuxt.js? Lets kick off explaining what Nuxt.js actually is, and why we decided to create a kit with this technology.

Nuxt is a framework built on top of Vue. It helps you handle complex configuration with an easy command-line setup, such as asynchronous routing with middlewares, great SEO using SSR, automatic code-splitting, auto imports and many more.

It also brings its own features, such as build-in components, different ways for getting data from an API, 2 rendering methods (Server-side or Static sites), and even its own loader, transitions, and animations.

At first, you might find Nuxt a bit challenging. For example, if you have never used SSR before, it takes time to get used to it, and you will have to change your mindset from Vue as they handle logic quite differently. But we think all that effort will be worth it, because we think Nuxt is a great framework for your next application. It can make your development experience more gratifying and faster, and your site more SEO friendly.

Pinia

Lets now dive in into the state management library that we choose. As stated from the previous official library Vuex, Pinia is now the default state management library for Vue.

When sharing global state within your application, you want it to be secure and easy to use, especially if you are using SSR as we are more likely doing with Nuxt. Pinia is pretty good at helping us with those matters.

Using Pinia with Nuxt 2 is a bit tricky but nothing crazy. You just need to install an extra package in order to use Composition-API inside Nuxt 2, make some config adjustments, and then you are good to go!

Tailwind

Tailwind is a great utility-first CSS framework that helps you build websites more quickly.

Nuxt helps us set up Tailwind from scratch pretty easily when creating our project from the command-line. It does the config setups, and also installs the packages we need in order to start using it.

What’s inside the Nuxt 2 Kit?

Our main goal when creating a starter.dev kit is to provide the essential things for your project without adding too much configuration to make them as flexible as possible.

The kit includes two main components. The first one is a counter component, managing the state with a Pinia store and a Fetch component showing how data can be fetched inside Nuxt 2. Both of these components have their own Storybook component, and a test component written with testing library and MSW. These are basic examples to demonstrate how you can utilize these technologies together.

The kit also includes ESlint, Prettier and Husky basic configurations. Also, the whole kit is written in TypeScript, which includes configuration within the kit as well. Our goal here is to save you all that time that it would take to get all these tools configured properly when starting a new project.

How do I use the kit?

With our starter.dev CLI! Of course there are other methods, but this one is for sure the easiest one.

Just run the command npx @this-dot/create-starter. After running this command, a list of available starter.dev kits will show up. Of course you can select the best one that fits your needs. In this case, it will be the nuxt2-pinia-tailwind one! It will ask for the name of your new project, and once that is written down, the CLI will start to prepare the kit for you!

Now that the kit is installed, you can cd into your new project directory with the name you provided before, and then start coding! Oh, but don’t forget to install the dependencies needed with your package manager of choice (I recommend pnpm 🫣).

Take a look at https://starter.dev/kits/nuxt2-pinia-tailwind/ so you can have a deeper view of the kit! Where you can read the README.md file for more detailed documentation, as well as looking at the source code, don't forget to read the package.json file to see the scripts available for the kit. Happy coding!

This Dot is a consultancy dedicated to guiding companies through their modernization and digital transformation journeys. Specializing in replatforming, modernizing, and launching new initiatives, we stand out by taking true ownership of your engineering projects.

We love helping teams with projects that have missed their deadlines or helping keep your strategic digital initiatives on course. Check out our case studies and our clients that trust us with their engineering.

About the author(s)

Jesús Padrón
@padron4497 @jesus4497

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This gives us the flexibility to keep composing our styles with utility classes. Some things are better left to utilities The best way to avoid wandering too far off the path of enlightenment is to stick with utility classes for certain (most?) things. Spacing and layouting are examples of things that are probably best left to utility classes. These typically vary all across a page, and encoding them in a class will make it a lot less flexible. A code smell to look out for: If you have abstracted something to a class and you end up overriding certain aspects of its styles in different places. Those styles should probably be utility classes. Classes as components Tailwind has always recommended using a component system for your UI components so that your utility classes are all defined in a single place. You don’t want to have to edit 50 different files to make a change to the style of your buttons across your website. 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3 VueJS Component Libraries Perfect for Beginners

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How to build an AI assistant with OpenAI, Vercel AI SDK, and Ollama with Next.js

In today’s blog post, we’ll build an AI Assistant using three different AI models: Whisper and TTS from OpenAI and Llama 3.1 from Meta. While exploring AI, I wanted to try different things and create an AI assistant that works by voice. This curiosity led me to combine OpenAI’s Whisper and TTS models with Meta’s Llama 3.1 to build a voice-activated assistant. Here’s how these models will work together: * First, we’ll send our audio to the Whisper model, which will convert it from speech to text. * Next, we’ll pass that text to the Llama 3.1 model. Llama will understand the text and generate a response. * Finally, we’ll take Llama’s response and send it to the TTS model, turning the text back into speech. We’ll then stream that audio back to the client. Let’s dive in and start building this excellent AI Assistant! Getting started We will use different tools to build our assistant. To build our client side, we will use Next.js. However, you could choose whichever framework you prefer. 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Kicking things off It's time to kick things off by setting up our Next.js app. Let's start with this command: ` After running the command, you’ll see a few prompts to set the app's details. Let's go step by step: * Name your app. * Enable app router. The other steps are optional and entirely up to you. In my case, I also chose to use TypeScript and Tailwind CSS. Now that’s done, let’s go into our project and install the dependencies that we need to run our models: ` Building our client logic Now, our goal is to record our voice, send it to the backend, and then receive a voice response from it. To record our audio, we need to use client-side functions, which means we need to use client components. In our case, we don’t want to transform our whole page to use client capabilities and have the whole tree in the client bundle; instead, we would prefer to use Server components and import our client components to progressively enhance our application. So, let’s create a separate component that will handle the client-side logic. Inside our app folder, let's create a components folder, and here, we will be creating our component: ` Let’s go ahead and initialize our component. I went ahead and added a button with some styles in it: ` And then import it into our Page Server component: ` Now, if we run our app, we should see the following: Awesome! Now, our button doesn’t do anything, but our goal is to record our audio and send it to someplace; for that, let us create a hook that will contain our logic: ` We will use two APIs to record our voice: navigator and MediaRecorder. The navigator API will give us information about the user’s media devices like the user media audio, and the MediaRecorder will help us record the audio from it. This is how they’re going to play out together: ` Let’s explain this code step by step. First, we create two new states. The first one is for keeping track of when we are recording, and the second one stores the instance of our MediaRecorder. ` Then, we’ll create our first method, startRecording. Here, we are going to have the logic to start recording our audio. We first check if the user has media devices available thanks to the navigator API that gives us information about the browser environment of our user: If we don’t have media devices to record our audio, we just return. If they do, then let us create a stream using their audio media device. ` Finally, we go ahead and create an instance of a MediaRecorder to record this audio: ` Then we need a method to stop our recording, which will be our stopRecording. Here, we will just stop our recording in case a media recorder exists. ` We are recording our audio, but we are not storing it anywhere. Let’s add a new useEffect and ref to accomplish this. We would need a new ref, and this is where our chunks of audio data will be stored. ` In our useEffect we are going to do two main things: store those chunks in our ref, and when it stops, we are going to create a new Blob of type audio/mp3: ` It is time to wire this hook with our AudioRecorder component: ` Let’s go to the other side of the coin, the backend! Setting up our Server side We want to use our models on the server to keep things safe and run faster. Let’s create a new route and add a handler for it using route handlers from Next.js. In our App folder, let’s make an “Api” folder with the following route in it: We want to use our models on the server to keep things safe and run faster. Let’s create a new route and add a handler for it using route handlers from Next.js. In our App folder, let’s make an “Api” folder with the following route in it: ` Our route is called ‘chat’. In the route.ts file, we’ll set up our handler. Let’s start by setting up our OpenAI SDK. ` In this route, we’ll send the audio from the front end as a base64 string. Then, we’ll receive it and turn it into a Buffer object. ` It’s time to use our first model. We want to turn this audio into text and use OpenAI’s Whisper Speech-To-Text model. Whisper needs an audio file to create the text. Since we have a Buffer instead of a file, we’ll use their ‘toFile’ method to convert our audio Buffer into an audio file like this: ` Notice that we specified “mp3”. This is one of the many extensions that the Whisper model can use. You can see the full list of supported extensions here: https://platform.openai.com/docs/api-reference/audio/createTranscription#audio-createtranscription-file Now that our file is ready, let’s pass it to Whisper! Using our OpenAI instance, this is how we will invoke our model: ` That’s it! Now, we can move on to the next step: using Llama 3.1 to interpret this text and give us an answer. We’ll use two methods for this. First, we’ll use ‘ollama’ from the ‘ollama-ai-provider’ package, which lets us use this model with our locally running Ollama. Then, we’ll use ‘generateText’ from the Vercel AI SDK to generate the text. Side note: To make our Ollama run locally, we need to write the following command in the terminal: ` ` Finally, we have our last model: TTS from OpenAI. We want to reply to our user with audio, so this model will be really helpful. It will turn our text into speech: ` The TTS model will turn our response into an audio file. We want to stream this audio back to the user like this: ` And that’s all the whole backend code! Now, back to the frontend to finish wiring everything up. Putting It All Together In our useRecordVoice.tsx hook, let's create a new method that will call our API endpoint. This method will also take the response back and play to the user the audio that we are streaming from the backend. ` Great! Now that we’re getting our streamed response, we need to handle it and play the audio back to the user. We’ll use the AudioContext API for this. This API allows us to store the audio, decode it and play it to the user once it’s ready: ` And that's it! Now the user should hear the audio response on their device. To wrap things up, let's make our app a bit nicer by adding a little loading indicator: ` Conclusion In this blog post, we saw how combining multiple AI models can help us achieve our goals. We learned to run AI models like Llama 3.1 locally and use them in our Next.js app. We also discovered how to send audio to these models and stream back a response, playing the audio back to the user. This is just one of many ways you can use AI—the possibilities are endless. AI models are amazing tools that let us create things that were once hard to achieve with such quality. Thanks for reading; now, it’s your turn to build something amazing with AI! You can find the complete demo on GitHub: AI Assistant with Whisper TTS and Ollama using Next.js...

Sep 27, 2024

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Learning Paths for Next.JS Developers with Ankita Kulkarni

In this video, Rob Ocel and co-hosts Tracy Lee, Adam Rackis, and Danny Thompson talk with tech educator Ankita Kulkarni about her journey from engineering leader to full-time educator. Ankita shares insights on teaching Next.js, bridging practical knowledge gaps, and helping developers tackle real-world challenges. They discuss Next.js as a React-based framework, its benefits, and the challenges it presents for beginners. Chapters - Introduction to the Podcast and Guests 00:01 - Meet Ankita Kulkarni, Tech Educator 00:26 - Ankita's Transition to Full-Time Education 01:41 - Teaching Practical Knowledge in Next.js 03:19 - Effective Methods for Teaching Next.js 05:27 - Challenges of Being a Full-Time Educator 07:48 - Balancing Broad and Specific Examples 09:54 - Embracing Mistakes as a Teaching Tool 12:13 - Pair Programming and Mentorship 14:00 - Discussion on Next.js and Framework Adoption 16:48 - Advantages and Challenges of Next.js 18:12 - Choosing the Right Framework for Your Needs 20:35 - Impact of Next.js in React Documentation 22:26 - Learning Paths for New Developers 23:24 - The Rise of Full-Stack Web Development 25:09 - Benefits of Frameworks Abstracting Complexity 26:27 - OpenNext and Deployment Flexibility 28:06 - Ankita's Excitement for New Next.js Features 30:35 - The Future of Next.js Without Vercel 32:16 - Final Thoughts and Where to Find Everyone Online 34:21 Follow Ankita Kulkarni on Social Media Twitter: https://x.com/kulkarniankita9 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@kulkarniankita Sponsored by This Dot: thisdot.co...

Nov 12, 2024

2 mins

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Introducing the New Nuxt 2 - Pinia - Tailwind Kit in Starter.dev

Nuxt

Pinia

Tailwind

What’s inside the Nuxt 2 Kit?

How do I use the kit?

Jesús Padrón

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