Kirby + Vue.js Starterkit

SPA with Vue 3 and Kirby: SEO-friendly, automatic routing, i18n and more!
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Kirby + Vue.js Starterkit

Key Features

• ⚡️ Vue 3 & Vite
• 🛣 Automatic routing
• 📦 On-demand components auto importing
• 📑 Nuxt-inspired module system
• 🔍 SEO-friendly: server-side generated meta tags
• 🌐 Multi-language support
• ♿ Accessible frontend routing
• 🚝 Offline-first
• 💫 Stale-while-revalidate page data

Heads Up: Another Boilerplate Available

The Kirby + Vue.js Lightkit is a simpler version of this boilerplate, which you might be interested in for smaller, less complex projects. Since routing is defined inside your SPA, rather than Kirby, another set of features awaits:

• 🗂 File-based routing like Nuxt.js
• 📑 Layout system
• 🎨 Windi CSS – Next generation utility-first CSS framework
• 😃 Use icons from any icon sets, with no compromise

Introduction

Or jump right to the setup.

This boilerplate is a tight and comprehensive integration of Vue.js in the frontend and Kirby as headless CMS. The content is provided as JSON through Kirby and fetched by the frontend.

Folder Structure

Some notes about the folder structure with some additional comments on important files.

Expand folder tree

kirby-vue3-starterkit/
|
|   # Main entry point of the website, point your web server to this directory
├── public/
|   |
|   |   # Frontend assets generated by Vite (not tracked by Git)
|   ├── dist/
|   |
|   |   # Static images like icons
|   ├── img/
|   |
|   |   # Kirby's media folder for thumbnails and more (not tracked by Git)
|   └── media/
|
|   # Various development-related Node scripts
├── scripts/
|   |
|   |   # Service worker generator (optional)
|   └── buildServiceWorker.js
|
|   # Kirby's core folder containing templates, blueprints, etc.
├── site/
|   ├── config/
|   |   |
|   |   |   # General configuration settings for Kirby and plugins
|   |   ├── config.php
|   |   |
|   |   |   # Builds a JSON-encoded `site` object for the frontend
|   |   |   # Used by Vue Router to populate routes, but can be extended by commonly used data
|   |   └── app-site.php
|   |
|   |   # Only relevant in multi-language setups
|   ├── languages/
|   |
|   ├── plugins/kirby-vite/
|   |   |
|   |   |   # Core of the Vite integration plugin, mainly registers routes
|   |   ├── index.php
|   |   |
|   |   |   # Routes to handle `.json` requests and serving the `index.php` snippet
|   |   └── routes.php
|   |
|   |   # Templates for JSON content representations fetched by frontend
|   |   # Contains also index page (`_app-index.php`)
|   └── templates/
|       |
|       |   # Handles build asset paths, inlines the `site` object, includes SEO meta tags, etc.
|       └── _app-index.php
|
|   # Includes all frontend-related sources
├── src/
|   |
|   |   # `Header`, `Footer`, `Intro` and other components (auto imported on-demand)
|   ├── components/
|   |
|   |   # Hooks for common actions
|   ├── hooks/
|   |   |
|   |   |   # Announces any useful information for screen readers
|   |   ├── useAnnouncer.js
|   |   |
|   |   |   # Provides information about the current language
|   |   ├── useLanguages.js
|   |   |
|   |   |   # Retrieves pages from the content API
|   |   ├── useKirbyApi.js
|   |   |
|   |   |   # Returns page data for the current path, similarly to Kirby's `$page` object
|   |   ├── usePage.js
|   |   |
|   |   |   # Various service worker methods like registering
|   |   ├── useServiceWorker.js
|   |   |
|   |   |   # Returns a object corresponding to Kirby's global `$site`
|   |   └── useSite.js
|   |
|   |   # Modules system entries will be auto installed
|   ├── modules/
|   |   |
|   |   |   # Installs the `v-kirbytext` directive to handle internal page links inside KirbyText
|   |   ├── kirbytext.js
|   |   |
|   |   |   # Initializes the Vue Router
|   |   └── router.js
|   |
|   |   # Vue.js views corresponding to Kirby templates
|   |   # Routes are being automatically resolved
|   ├── views/
|   |
|   ├── App.vue
|   ├── index.css
|   ├── index.js
|   └── serviceWorker.js
|
|   # Contains everything content and user data related (not tracked by Git)
├── storage/
|   ├── accounts/
|   ├── cache/
|   ├── content/
|   ├── logs/
|   └── sessions/
|
|   # Kirby CMS and other PHP dependencies (handled by Composer)
├── vendor/
|
|   # Environment variables for both Kirby and Vite (to be duplicated as `.env`)
├── .env.example
|
|   # Configuration file for Vite
└── vite.config.js

Caching & Offline Capability With Service Worker

Even without a service worker installed, the frontend will store pages between individual routes/views. When the tab get reloaded, the data for each page is freshly fetched from the API once again.

For offline capability of your Vue app, you can choose to activate the included service worker.

A visual explanation of both methods can be found in the following flow chart:

The service worker precaches all CSS & JS assets required by the Vue app and caches the data of every requested page. All assets are versioned and served from the service worker cache directly.

Each JSON request will be freshly fetched from the network and saved to the cache. If the user's navigator turns out to be offline, the cached page request will be returned.

Stale-While-Revalidate

The stale-while-revalidate mechanism for the usePage hook allows you to respond as quickly as possible with cached page data if available, falling back to the network request if it's not cached. The network request is then used to update the cached page data – which directly affects the view after lazily assigning changes (if any), thanks to Vue's reactivity.

Prerequisites

• Node.js with npm (only required to build the frontend)
• PHP 7.4+

Kirby is not a free software. You can try it for free on your local machine but in order to run Kirby on a public server you must purchase a valid license.

Setup

Composer

Kirby-related dependencies are managed via Composer and located in the vendor directory. Install them with:

composer install

Node Dependencies

Install npm dependencies:

npm ci

Environment Variables

Duplicate the .env.development.example as .env::

cp .env.development.example .env

Optionally, adapt it's values.

Static assets

During development Kirby can't access static files located in the src folder. Therefore it's necessary to create a symbolic link inside of the public folder:

ln -s $PWD/src/assets ./public/assets

Usage

Build Mode

During development a .lock file will be generated inside the src directory to let the backend now it runs in development mode. This file is deleted when running the build command.

ℹ️ Alternatively, you can set a KIRBY_MODE env variable containing either development or production to set the app mode programmatically and overwrite the .lock file mechanism. This may ease setups with Docker.

Development

You can start the development process with:

# Runs `npm run kirby` parallel to `vite`
npm run dev

Afterwards visit the app in your browser: http://127.0.0.1:8080

For Valet users: Of course you can use a virtual host alternatively!

Vite is used in combination with backend integration and only serves frontend assets, not the whole app. Thus, http://localhost:3000 won't be accessible.

The backend is served by the PHP built-in web server on http://127.0.0.1:8080 by default, but you can adapt the location in your .env file.

Production

Build optimized frontend assets to public/dist:

npm run build

Vite will generate a hashed version of all assets, including images and fonts saved inside src/assets. It will further create a manifest.json file with hash records etc.

Deployment

ℹ️ See ploi-deploy.sh for exemplary deployment instructions.

ℹ️ Some hosting environments require to uncomment RewriteBase / in .htaccess to make site links work.

Configuration

All development and production related configurations for both backend and frontend code are located in your .env file:

• KIRBY_DEV_HOSTNAME and KIRBY_DEV_PORT specify the address where you wish the Kirby backend to be served from. It is used by the frontend to fetch content data as JSON.
• Keys starting with VITE_ are available in your code following the import.meta.env.VITE_CUSTOM_VARIABLE syntax.

For example, setting KIRBY_CACHE to true is useful in production environment.

Content API Slug

To change the API slug to fetch JSON-encoded page data from, set

• CONTENT_API_SLUG to a value of your liking (defaults to spa). It can even be left empty to omit a slug altogether!

You can't use Kirby's internal API slug (defaults to api). If you insist on using api for your content endpoint, you can rename Kirby's by adding a KIRBY_API_SLUG key and set it to something other than api.

Multi-Language

Multiple languages are supported. A comprehensive introduction about multi-language setups may be found on the Kirby website.

To enable language handling, you don't have to edit the config.php manually. Just set

• KIRBY_MULTILANG to true.
• KIRBY_MULTILANG_DETECT to true (optional but recommended).

Then, visit the panel and add new languages by your liking. The Panel automatically renames all existing content and file meta data files and includes the language extension.

Language data is provided by the global site object, which can be accessed via the useSite() hook.

Service Worker

To enable the service worker which precaches essential assets and page API calls for offline capability, set:

• VITE_SERVICE_WORKER to true

⚠️ Don't change the CONTENT_API_SLUG once you deployed your app publicly and thus a service worker is installed on clients. Otherwise fetch requests will fail and a blank page will show until the new service worker is activated, which then is only possible by closing the tab/PWA.

Stale-While-Revalidating

To keep page data fresh with stale-while-revalidate, set:

• VITE_STALE_WHILE_REVALIDATE to true

Credits

• Huge thanks to arnoson for his Kirby Vite Plugin.
• Thanks to Jakub Medvecký Heretik for his inspirational work on kirby-vue-starterkit which got me starting to build my own Kirby Vue integration.

License

MIT License © 2021 Johann Schopplich