Installing Addons

Installing Addons

Ember has a rich ecosystem of addons that can be easily added to projects. Addons provide a wide range of functionality to projects, often saving time and letting you focus on your project.

To browse addons, visit the Ember Observer website. It catalogs and categorizes ember addons that have been published to NPM and assigns them a score based on a variety of criteria.

For Super Rentals, we'll take advantage of two addons: ember-cli-tutorial-style and ember-cli-mirage.

ember-cli-tutorial-style

Instead of having you copy/paste in CSS to style Super Rentals, we've created an addon called ember-cli-tutorial-style that instantly adds CSS to the tutorial. The addon works by creating a file called ember-tutorial.css and putting that file in the super-rentals vendor directory. As Ember CLI runs, it takes the ember-tutorial CSS file and puts it in vendor.css (which is referenced in app/index.html). We can make additional style tweaks to vendor/ember-tutorial.css, and the changes will take effect whenever we restart the app.

Run the following command to install the addon:

ember install ember-cli-tutorial-style

Since Ember addons are npm packages, ember install installs them in the node_modules directory, and makes an entry in package.json. Be sure to restart your server after the addon has installed successfully. Restarting the server will incorporate the new CSS and refreshing the browser window will give you this:

ember-cli-mirage

Mirage is a client HTTP stubbing library often used for Ember acceptance testing. For the case of this tutorial, we'll use mirage as our source of data. Mirage will allow us to create fake data to work with while developing our app and mimic a running backend server.

Install the Mirage addon as follows:

ember install ember-cli-mirage

If you were running ember serve in another shell, restart the server to include Mirage in your build.

Let's now configure Mirage to send back our rentals that we had defined above by updating mirage/config.js:

export default function() {
  this.namespace = '/api';

  this.get('/rentals', function() {
    return {
      data: [{
        type: 'rentals',
        id: 'grand-old-mansion',
        attributes: {
          title: 'Grand Old Mansion',
          owner: 'Veruca Salt',
          city: 'San Francisco',
          type: 'Estate',
          bedrooms: 15,
          image: 'https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cb/Crane_estate_(5).jpg'
        }
      }, {
        type: 'rentals',
        id: 'urban-living',
        attributes: {
          title: 'Urban Living',
          owner: 'Mike Teavee',
          city: 'Seattle',
          type: 'Condo',
          bedrooms: 1,
          image: 'https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0e/Alfonso_13_Highrise_Tegucigalpa.jpg'
        }
      }, {
        type: 'rentals',
        id: 'downtown-charm',
        attributes: {
          title: 'Downtown Charm',
          owner: 'Violet Beauregarde',
          city: 'Portland',
          type: 'Apartment',
          bedrooms: 3,
          image: 'https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f7/Wheeldon_Apartment_Building_-_Portland_Oregon.jpg'
        }
      }]
    };
  });
}

This configures Mirage so that whenever Ember Data makes a GET request to /api/rentals, Mirage will return this JavaScript object as JSON. In order for this to work, we need our application to default to making requests to the namespace of /api. Without this change, navigation to /rentals in our application would conflict with Mirage.

To do this, we want to generate an application adapter.

ember generate adapter application

This adapter will extend the JSONAPIAdapter base class from Ember Data:

import DS from 'ember-data';

export default DS.JSONAPIAdapter.extend({
  namespace: 'api'
});