How to make rails work with vue.js?

Question

Well my question is simple, how to make a Ruby on Rails app work with Vue.js?

The details

I first look at the vue-rails gem, but that add Vue to the rails asset pipeline, and I want to work with other npm packages, like browserify. Then I look to that, browserify-rails that enable commonjs in the js folder app/assets/javascript/. Also I'm planning to make a Vuejs app for every rails controller, and access to backend actions with the vue-resource and vue-router (if this isn't a good approach please let me know), so I added the following line to my layout

<%= javascript_include_tag params[:controller] %>

That will add a js file with the name of the controller, so the UsersController will have the users.js file with the main vue app for that controller.

Then, to try this I scaffolded a Users resource with rails, and make it render json format in every action, like this

def index
    @users = User.all

    respond_to do |format|
      format.html # index.html.erb
      format.json { render json: @users }
    end
end

That is working fine. Then in the app/assets/javascript/ folder I add users.js with the following content

var Vue = require('vue');
Vue.use(require('vue-resource'));

new Vue({
    ready: function(){
        this.$http.get('users.json').then(function(response){
            console.log(JSON.stringify(response));
        });
    }
});

And when I inspect dev console in chrome, I see that Vue is added, but I don't see any response, and I had already inserted one user. By the way, I'm trying with the https://vuejs-rails-yerkopalma.c9users.io/users url (I'm developing in c9.io) and only the /users/index.html.erb file is rendered. So, waht are my guesses:

1. I might be using vue-resource in a wrong way, I mean the url passed to the get() function.
2. I might be missing some vue-resource configuration.
3. Maybe I just should use the vue-rails gem combined with brwoserify-rails but I just don't know how. Any help or guideline would be appreciate.

Here is my application.js file (is also included in my layout file)

// This is a manifest file that'll be compiled into application.js, which will include all the files
// listed below.
//
// Any JavaScript/Coffee file within this directory, lib/assets/javascripts, vendor/assets/javascripts,
// or any plugin's vendor/assets/javascripts directory can be referenced here using a relative path.
//
// It's not advisable to add code directly here, but if you do, it'll appear at the bottom of the
// compiled file.
//
// Read Sprockets README (https://github.com/rails/sprockets#sprockets-directives) for details
// about supported directives.
//
//= require jquery
//= require jquery_ujs
//= require bootstrap-sprockets

Answer 1

For Rails 5.1+, it will come with yarn & webpack support.

Also, with this pull request to webpacker, Vue will be supported out of the box.

To get started with Vue on Rails,

1. Add gem 'webpacker' to gemfile
2. bundle install
3. Run rails webpacker:install && rails webpacker:install:vue

Alternatively with Rails 5.1x, do rails new app --webpack=vue

You will be ready for Vue on Rails 5

Answer 2

I managed to make this work with Vue.js.

first I added an el propertie to the object passed to Vue constructor, and I started to get an error saying that body element was not defined. Obviously the body element is always present in an html file, so I though it was a problem about when the Vue instances were created. So I simply wrapped all on a ready event.

$(document).on('ready page:change', function() {
    var Vue = require('vue');

    Vue.use(require('vue-resource'));       

    new Vue({
        el: 'body',
        data: {
            users: []
        },
        ready: function(){
            this.$http.get('users.json').then(function(response){

                console.log(JSON.stringify(response.data));
                this.users = response.data;
            }, function(response){
                console.log("fail");
                console.log(JSON.stringify(response));
            });                
        }
    });        
});

And that works fine!

Because I'm using turbolinks, I also included the page:change event. And in my view index.html.erb I have access to Vue instance. So this make this case working and it's fine for this particular question, however I now have another issue working with .vue components, maybe I'll open another question about it.

Notice that in my index.html.erb view I have access to the Vue instance defined in users.js file in the assets/javascript/ folder, but that I have not access to Vue or any of the js modules loaded with browserify from the views folder