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!
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