Qwik

Starter.dev: Bootstrap your project with zero configuration!

Published Nov 7, 2022

Updated Feb 13, 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This article was written over 18 months ago and may contain information that is out of date.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: Bootstrap your project with zero configuration!

Why Starter Kits?
Why Showcases?
Getting Started
What Kits Exist Today?
Collaborate with Us
What’s Next?

We’re excited to present you with starter.dev, a set of zero-configuration project kits built with your favorite tools. Each kit is configured with the following so you can focus on building features instead of spending time on configuration:

State Management
Data Fetching
Testing
Storybook
Community standardized ESLint and Prettier

We’re also launching starter.dev showcases which utilizes the kits and demonstrates how to build at-scale applications and go beyond the basic TodoMVC app, though we love a good TodoMVC!

Why Starter Kits?

This Dot Labs engages with its clients to build modern applications, and many of them are requesting greenfield projects using the latest and greatest technologies.

While starting these projects, our architects found that they were repeating a bunch of the same steps each time they needed to start a new one. Most meta frameworks ship with the bare minimum, and don’t include features like testing or Storybook out of the box, and configuring these technologies can be time consuming.

With this challenge in mind, we sought to create zero-config starter templates to help kick start projects. And thus, starter.dev was born!

Why Showcases?

During starter.dev’s development, Minko Gechev from the Angular team approached us about a project to help enhance Angular education tooling. You can learn more about this specific effort in the blog post announcing the GitHub Clone Showcases.

Minko’s idea was to demonstrate building applications that utilize these key features of the Angular framework:

Routing Forms State Management API interactions - REST or GraphQL Authentication

This idea laid the groundwork for many of the starter kits we created. We’ve developed several GitHub Clone showcase to help developers understand how to best utilize the kits, and build at-scale applications that accompany our kits.

Getting Started

Getting started with starter.dev (pun intended) is as simple as running a scaffolding script:

Run npx @this-dot/create-starter to run the scaffolding tool
Select one of the kits from our library from the CLI
Name your project
cd into your project directory, install dependencies using the tool of your choice.

After completing these steps, you can start building features in your new project immediately.

What Kits Exist Today?

This Dot is happy to ship starter.dev with the following kits:

Angular + Apollo Client + Tailwind CSS
Angular + NgRx + SCSS
Create React App + RxJS + Styled Components
Next.js + TanStack Query (formerly React Query) + Tailwind CSS
Remix + GraphQL + Tailwind CSS
Vue 3 + Apollo Client + Quasar
Qwik + GraphQL + Tailwind CSS
SvelteKit + SASS

Each kit ships with the following out-of-the-box:

Testing via jest or vitest
Storybook
ESLint and Prettier Configuration
State Management
Data Fetching for either REST or GraphQL
Some starter components to demonstrate global state management and data fetching

These starter kits don’t ship with E2E testing libraries, such as Cypress or Playwright, for now, because these tools come with amazing out-of-the-box configurations and do not require additional setups. However, the showcases use Cypress tests consistency which you can check out in the showcases repo.

Collaborate with us

Starter.dev began as an internal need, but anyone can benefit from the existence of these kits. While there is a set structure for building out new kits, This Dot welcomes requests for new kits.

We’ll work with you to determine what the structure of your kit should be and then scaffold out all of the issues needed to complete the work. Our team will help build out new issues, but we encourage the community to jump in and help build as well. This is a great opportunity to collaborate with the community as both a learner and a teacher.

At This Dot, two of our guiding principles are: Getting Better Together and Giving Back to the Community. We believe that starter.dev is a perfect opportunity for us to get better through collaborative efforts with community members, and helping the community through what we hope is a great open source resource.

What’s Next?

We want to get this tool into your hands, and improve what exists. Tell us what is working for you and not, and we’ll do our best to address those issues.

Next, we want to expand our library of kits. Tell us what are some kits you would like to see. We’re looking into building out kits for SolidJS and Node backend technologies as part of our next iterations, but we’re sure there other tools people would like to see.

Finally, we’ll be publishing some additional educational materials around some of the decisions and design patterns we’ve chosen for each kit and showcase. We’re excited to share our process with you.

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)

Dustin Goodman
Engineering Manager with a passion for web and application development. Speaker and writer on work experiences and software development. Dog dad and musician fueled by coffee.
@dustinsgoodman @dustinsgoodman

How to Build Apps with Great Startup Performance Using Qwik

In this article, we will recap the JS Drops Qwik workshop with Misko Hevery. This workshop provided an overview on Qwik, its unique features and a look at some example components. We will also address some of the questions raised at the end of the workshop. If you want to learn more about Qwik with Misko Hevery, then please check out this presentation on This Dot Media’s YouTube Channel. Also don’t forget to subscribe to get the latest on all things web development. Table of Contents - What is Qwik? - How to create a Counter Component in Qwik - Unique features of Qwik - Directory Based Routing - Slots in Qwik - Very little JavaScript in production - Resumability with Qwik - Lazy load components by default - Questions asked during the workshop - Are all these functions generated at build time or are they generated at runtime? What's the server consideration here (if any) or are we able to put everything behind a CDN? - How do you access elements in Qwik? - Can you force a download of something out of view? - What is the choice to use $ on Qwik declarations? - Can you explain the interop story with web components and Qwik? Any parts of the Qwik magic that aren’t available to us if, say, our web components are too complex? - Is there an ideal use case for Qwik? - When to use useWatch$ instead of useClientEffect$? - Conclusion What is Qwik? Qwik is a web framework that builds fast web applications with consistent performance at scale regardless of size or complexity. To get started with Qwik, run the following command: ` The Qwik CLI will prompt options to scaffold a starter project on your local machine. To start the demo application, run npm start and navigate to http://127.0.0.1:5173/ in the browser. How to create a Counter Component in Qwik Create a sub-directory in the routes directory named counter and add an index.tsx file with the component definition below. ` Now navigate to http://127.0.0.1:5173/counter and you should see the counter component rendered on the page. Unique features of Qwik Directory Based Routing Qwik is a directory-based routing framework. When we initiated Qwik, it created a routes sub-directory in the src directory and added index and layout files for route matching. The index.tsx is the base route component and the layout.tsx is the component for handling the base page layout. The sub-directories in the route directory serve as the application’s structure for route matching with its index.tsx files as the route components. Every index.tsx file does a look up for the layout component. If it doesn’t exist in the same directory, then it moves up to the parent directory. ` Slots in Qwik Qwik uses slots as a way of connecting content from the parent component to the child projection. The parent component uses the q:slot attribute to identify the source of the projection and the element to identify the destination of the projection. To learn more about slots, please check out the Qwik documentation. Very little JavaScript in production In production, Qwik starts the application with no JavaScript at startup, which makes the startup performance really fast. To see this in action, open the browser’s dev tools, click on the Network tab, and on the Filter tab select JS. You will notice the Vite files for hot module reloading are currently the only JavaScript files served which will not be shipped to production. Go to the filter tab and check the invert checkbox then in the filter input type select Vite. Resumability with Qwik Qwik applications do not require hydration to resume an application on the client. To see this in action, click on the increment button and observe the browser’s dev tools network tab. You will notice Qwik is downloading only the required amount of JavaScript needed. The way Qwik attaches the event to the DOM and handles the state of components is that it serializes the attribute, which tells the browser where to download the event handler and its state. To learn more about serialization with Qwik, read through the Qwik documentation. By default, the code associated with the click event will not download until the user triggers that event. On this interaction, Qwik will only download the minimum code for the event handler to work. To learn more about Qwik events, please read through the [documentation] (https://qwik.builder.io/docs/components/events/#events)....

Dec 9, 2022

5 mins

JavaScriptQwik

How to Setup Storybook in a Qwik Project

Introduction Storybook is a great tool for testing and visualizing your components in different states. In this article, we will see how to setup Storybook in a Qwik project. Qwik Qwik is a new JavaScript framework by Misko Hevery, creator of Angular, for building frontend browser applications. The major benefit of Qwik is its performance optimization, and this is achieved through zero loading, resumability, lazy loading, reduced rendering, scalability, and code once. For more information on Qwik, you can check out the docs, github repo, and discord. Project Set Up To get started, we need to create a new Qwik app. We can do this by running the following command in our terminal: ` Initialize Storybook Storybook, unfortunately, doesn’t have a Qwik template yet because it is a new Framework. So the work around is to use the html template . Using the command below, we can initialize Storybook: ` During the initialization, Storybook would ask to automatically install some optional dependencies such as; EslintPlugin and npm7, you can accept or reject it. To accept, type y and hit Enter to progress. Storybook would try to setup a default stories folder, which is based on the ` template we choose, which is `. It is not compatible with the Qwik compiler and will result in compilation errors, so we will have to delete it to avoid running into such errors. Project Structure Our project structure is already setup by Qwik, and Storybook initialization has created a .storybook folder. But we need to make some changes to the Storybook file extension since our project is in TypeScript. This is a snippet of the folders in our project: ` Configuring Storybook Since Qwik runs on Vite, we need to set up the viteFinal function in our main.ts file, which will give us the config that we will use to register our Qwik Vite plugin. Add this line of code in the configuration object: ` In the preview.ts file, this is where we configure how Storybook renders our stories. We need to execute Qwikloader. This will help in registering global browser events, and much more Qwik related benefits. We will replace the content in the file with the code below: ` This solution was found in this discussion: How to do component testing with Qwik?. I believe when the Qwik Storybook type template becomes available these configurations will be there by default. Now we are done with the configuration, let's run storybook and see what we have: ` Creating Stories We can create our first story, we will create a story for our Qwik app component. We will create this story for our default Qwik Header component. I modified the Header component to accept a menus props: ` Conclusion In this article, we saw how to setup Storybook in a Qwik project. We also saw how to create our first story. I hope you enjoyed this article. Thanks for reading. If you don't want to do these steps yourself, check out our starter.dev Qwik kit that already has Storybook enabled for your use here. A link to the project repo can be found here. If you have any questions or run into any trouble, feel free to reach out on Twitter....

Dec 12, 2022

3 mins

Qwik

Configure your project with Drizzle for Local & Deployed Databases

Updated April 8, 2024: Thanks to Jassi Bacha for pointing out that the migrate function is not exported from the drizzle-orm/postgres-js/migrator module for Vercel. I've updated the article to reflect the correct import path. It was a fun Friday, and Jason Lengstorf and I both decided to try and use Drizzle on our respective projects. Jason went the SQLite route and wrote an amazing article about how he got his setup working. My approach was a bit different. I started with Vercel's Postgres + Drizzle Next.js Starter and wanted to use PostgreSQL. If you don't know what Drizzle is, it's a type-safe ORM similar to Prisma. My colleague, Dane Grant, wrote a great intro post on it, so go check his article out if you want to learn more about Drizzle. Getting my project off the ground took longer than I expected, especially coming from a starter kit, but I figured it out. This is the article I wish I had at the time to help get this project set up with less friction. I will focus on using local and Vercel PostgreSQL, but this same setup should work with other databases and adapters. I'll make some notes about where those places are. While I did use Next.js here, these setup instructions work on other projects, too. Configuring Drizzle Every project that leverages Drizzle requires a drizzle.config in the root. Because I'm leveraging TypeScript, I named mine drizzle.config.ts, and to secure secrets, I also installed dotenv. My final file appeared as follows: ` The schema field is used to identify where your project's database schema is defined. Mine is in a file called schema.ts but you can split your schema into multiple files and use glob patterns to detect all of them. The out field determines where your migration outputs will be stored. I recommend putting them in a folder in the same directory as your schema to keep all your database-related information together. Additionally, the config requires a driver and dbCredentials.connectionString to be specified so Drizzle knows what APIs to leverage and where your database lives. For the connectionString, I'm using dotenv to store the value in a secret and protect it. The connectionString should be in a valid connection format for your database. For PostgreSQL, this format is postgresql://:@:/. Getting your connection string Now, you may be wondering how to get that connection string. If you're hosting on Vercel using their Postgres offering, you need to go to your Vercel dashboard and select their Postgres option and attach it to your app. This will set environment variables for you that you can pull into your local development environment. This is all covered in their "Getting Started with Vercel Postgres" guide. If you use a different database hosting solution, they'll offer similar instructions for fetching your connection string. However, I wanted a local database to modify and blow away as needed for this project. Out of the box, Drizzle does not offer a database initialization command and I needed something that could be easily and quickly replicated across different machines. For this, I pulled in Docker Compose and set up my docker-compose.yaml as follows: ` The 3 most important values to note here are the values in the environment key and the ports. These are what allowed me to determine my connection key. For this example, it would be: postgresql://postgres:postgres@localhost:5432/my-local-db. With the compose file set, I ran docker-compose up -d to get the container running, which also initializes the database. Now, we can connect and operate on the database as needed. Creating the database connection To make operations in our app, we need to get a database connection instance. I put mine in db/drizzle.ts to keep all my related database files together. My file looks like: ` This is a bit more complicated because we're using 2 different Drizzle adapters depending on our environment. For local development, we're using the generic PostgreSQL adapter, but for production, we're using the Vercel adapter. While these have different initializers, they have the same output interface which is why this works. The same wouldn't be true if you used MySQL locally and PostgreSQL in production. If we chose a RDS or similar PostgreSQL solution, we could use the same postgres adapter in both cases but change the connection string. That's all this file does at the end - detects which environment and uses the chosen adapter. If we go to use this exported instance, it won't be able to find our tables or provide type safety. This is because we haven't created our database tables yet. Creating database tables To get our database tables created, we're going to leverage Drizzle's Migrations. This allows us to create atomic changes to our database as our schema evolves. To accomplish this, we define the schema changes in our schema files as specified in our config. Then we can run npm run drizzle-kit generate:pg (or whatever script runner you use) to generate the migration SQL file that will be located where we specified in our config. You want to check this file into source! By default, Drizzle doesn't allow you to override migration names _yet_ (they're working on it!) so if you want to make your migration file more descriptive, you need to take both of these steps: 1. Rename the migration file. Take note of the old name. 2. Locate _journal.json. It should be in your migration folder in a folder called meta. From here, find the old file name and replace it with the new file name. Now, we need to run the migrations. I had some issues with top-level awaits and tsx like the Drizzle docs recommend, so I had to go a slightly different route and I'm not thrilled about it still. I made a file called migrate.mts that I stored next to my drizzle.ts. In theory, I should have been able to import my drizzle connection instance here and use that, but I ran out of time to figure it out and ended up repeating myself across files. Here's the file: ` Here, I'm connecting to the correct database pending environment then running the drizzle migrate command. For local development, I set my connection pool to max at 1. This probably isn't necessary for this use case, but when connecting to a cluster, this is a recommended best practice from the Drizzle team. For the local case, I also had to close the connection to the db when I was done. For both cases, though, I had to specify the migrations folder location. I could probably DRY this up a bit, but hopefully, the Drizzle team will eliminate this need and use the config to set this value in the future. With the above file set and our schema generated, we can now run npm run tsx db/migrate.mts and our database will have our latest schema. We can now use the db client to fetch and store data in our database. Note: Jason uses the push command here. This is fine for an initial database creation, but it will override tables in the future. The migration path is the recommended pattern for non-destructive database updates. Conclusion Congratulations! We can connect to our database and perform CRUD operations against our tables. We can also use Drizzle Studio to modify and inspect our data. To review, we had to: 1. Setup a local PostgreSQL server via a tool like Docker Compose 2. Configure the database adapter to work in local mode 3. Generate a schema 4. Create a script to execute migrations so our database is aligned with our schema This was my first experience with Drizzle, and I enjoyed its SQL-like interfaces which made it easy to quickly prototype my project. I noticed in their Discord that they're about to have a full-time maintainer so I'm excited to see what their future looks like. I hope you enjoy it too!...

Mar 8, 2024

6 mins

VercelJavaScript

AI Leadership: Data-Driven Decision Making & Avoiding "Analysis Paralysis" with Jerry Reghunadh

In this episode of Leadership Exchange, host Rob Ocel chats with Jerry Reghunadh, Senior Director of Enterprise Architecture at Data Nimbus, about leadership, AI adoption, and data-driven decision-making. Jerry shares his career journey, insights on leveraging tools like ChatGPT and Copilot, and strategies for building effective data pipelines. They explore how companies can avoid "analysis paralysis," adopt AI strategically, and evaluate new technologies to solve real-world problems. Tune in for practical advice on aligning innovation with business goals and staying competitive in a rapidly evolving tech landscape. Chapters 00:00 – Introduction 00:31 – Jerry’s Leadership Journey 02:01 – Discussing AI in Leadership 03:59 – Experimenting with AI Tools 06:24 – Overcoming Analysis Paralysis 09:18 – Importance of Early AI Adoption 13:12 – AI’s Impact on Efficiency 14:30 – Sponsor Message 16:26 – Setting Realistic Goals for AI 19:41 – Data Management and AI 23:09 – Is AI Just a Fad? 27:22 – Testing New Technologies 29:56 – Final Thoughts on AI 30:25 – Connect with Jerry 30:44 – Closing Remarks 31:20 – Outro Follow Jerry on Social Media Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jerrymannel/ Sponsored by This Dot: thisdot.co...

Nov 18, 2024

1 min

AIEngineering Leadership

Let's innovate together!

We're ready to be your trusted technical partners in your digital innovation journey.

Whether it's modernization or custom software solutions, our team of experts can guide you through best practices and how to build scalable, performant software that lasts.

Starter.dev: Bootstrap your project with zero configuration!

Starter.dev: Bootstrap your project with zero configuration!

Table of contents

Why Starter Kits?

Why Showcases?

Getting Started

What Kits Exist Today?

Collaborate with us

What’s Next?

Dustin Goodman

You might also like

How to Build Apps with Great Startup Performance Using Qwik

How to Setup Storybook in a Qwik Project

Configure your project with Drizzle for Local & Deployed Databases

AI Leadership: Data-Driven Decision Making & Avoiding "Analysis Paralysis" with Jerry Reghunadh

Let's innovate together!

You might also like

How to Build Apps with Great Startup Performance Using Qwik

How to Setup Storybook in a Qwik Project

Configure your project with Drizzle for Local & Deployed Databases

AI Leadership: Data-Driven Decision Making & Avoiding "Analysis Paralysis" with Jerry Reghunadh