Svelte-Sapper-Contentful-Tailwind-Webpack Boilerplate

Boilerplate based on the default Sapper template. It allows setting up and kick-off your web project development within minutes. The boilerplate gathers:

• Svelte
• Contentful as Content Management System.
• scss syntax and Tailwindcss for styling.
• Webpack
• Deployment in Now

Getting started

Get the code

Clone the project and dive in.

git clone git@github.com:boxfish-studio/svelte-contentful-boilerplate.git
cd svelte-contentful-boilerplate

Connect to Contentful

Create Contentful environment file based on the given template

cp .env.example .env

Fill in the blank variables with your own Contentful space parameters

CONTENTFUL_SPACE=your_space_id
CONTENTFUL_ACCESS_TOKEN=your_space_delivery_token
CONTENTFUL_STAGING_TOKEN=your_space_preview_token

Run

Install dependancies and run:

yarn
yarn dev

The site should be available at localhost:3000.

Deployment

The project deploys with Now by default. There will be necessary to add the environment variables before using the scripts for deployment.

Environment Variables in Now

First of all, you need to install now and login with your account. Once it is done, you can define the environment variables in now.

The needed secrets names can be found in now.json:

{
    "env": {
        "CONTENTFUL_SPACE": "@contentful_space",
        "CONTENTFUL_ACCESS_TOKEN": "@contentful_access_token",
        "CONTENTFUL_STAGING_TOKEN": "@contentful_staging_token"
    }
}

Npm scripts for deployment

Once the environment variables are defined in now you can execute the scripts for deployment.

There are two npm scripts for deployment, one for production (npm run deploy-production) and another one for "draft" mode (npm run deploy-draft)``

Contentful and Svelte

The goal of using Svelte with Contentful is to be able to easily manage content and components. Therefore, there must be certain relation between Contentful models and Svelte components (i.e.: a component called Button could be associated to the model Button in Contentful).

On the other hand, a page from Contentful will be composed as:

// contentful.types.ts

export type Page = {
    id: string
    title: string
    slug: string
    components: Array<Component>
}

Where components defines all components to be injected into the rendered src/routes/[slug].svelte file.

Structure and Usage

On top of the standard Sapper template, Contentful and tailwindcss have been added.

src/lib/contentful

This folder hosts the necessary files for the integration with Contentful.

contentful.ts

In this file, there is a class that contains the configuration for Contentful client and some functions to retrieve data from the contentful API. some environment variables can be found in the constructor of this class. These variables are necessary to connect your app with your contentful space. In order to do that, these variables are initialized in a .env file that you can copy from .env.example in the root folder. The API keys can be found in the contentful space settings.

contentful.types.ts

In this file, you can find some types that will be used along with contentful models in the fetch functions of src/lib/contentful/contentful.ts.

src/routes/[slug].json.js & src/routes/[slug].svelte

These two files are used to retrieve the pages (content_type: 'page') from contentful API.

The file src/routes/[slug].json.js uses the created ContentfulApi class to fetch the page content from Contentful depending on the slug introduced in any /:slug route.

After fetching the data, the file src/routes/[slug].svelte renders the page content based on that data by importing a component called ComponentSwitch which will be the responsible for detecting the data type of page.components and rendering each component in the correct way.

// ComponentSwitch.svelte

{#each page.components as componentData (componentData.id)}
    <ComponentSwitch {componentData} />
{/each}

src/components/ComponentSwitch.svelte

This component renders each "component" of page.components based on the type property of each one:

// contentful.types.ts

export type Component = {
    id: string
    type: string // based on this property (e.g.: 'button')
    fields: Array<any>
}

To do that, this component should have an array of objects which represent the relationship between a Contentful Model and a Svelte Component. The id property represents the Contentful Model type and the component property represents the Svelte Component itself (notice that each component has to be imported to this file).

// ComponentSwitch.svelte

let COMPONENT_LIST = [
    { id: 'button', component: Button },
    { id: 'richTextBlock', component: RichTextBlock },
    { id: 'markdownBlock', component: MarkdownBlock }
]

Finally, this component finds out which component should render and renders it whith its properties.

Scss & Tailwindcss

This boilerplate uses both tailwindcss and scss.

To integrate them, there has been used two aproaches, one for general styles and another one for component based styles.

Integration for general styles

npm scripts has been used to achieve this integration. You can check package.json file to see all the existing scripts.

The script used to run the app in development mode is dev-draft which throught other npm scripts compiles all static/styles.scss styles to a final file static/styles.css and runs the app in "draft" mode to be able of fetching "draft" content from Contentful, which is the best aproach for development purposes. If you need to find out more information about how these npm scripts work, this css-tricks article has been used as main reference.

Integration for Svelte components

This integration has been done following this tutorial: https://dev.to/sarioglu/using-svelte-with-tailwindcss-a-better-approach-47ph but with some differences due to that this tutorial is just for Svelte (without Sapper). The only difference is in the section "3-Make the integration", where there only has been created "postcss.config.js" (removing purgecss from it) and instead of changing "rollup.config.js" (which doesn't exists in Sapper), there has been modified the file "svelte.config.js":

// svelte.config.js

const sveltePreprocess = require('svelte-preprocess')

module.exports.preprocess = sveltePreprocess({
    postcss: {
        plugins: [require('tailwindcss'), require('autoprefixer')]
    },
    scss: true
})

Notice that to use scss in components it is necessary write the style tag with type="text/scss":

<!-- SomeComponent.svelte -->

<style type="text/scss">
    /* scss and tailwind styling here... */
</style>

Authors

Boxfish Studio.