View Source Installation

LiveVue replaces esbuild with Vite for both client side code and SSR to achieve an amazing development experience. Why?

  • Vite provides a best-in-class Hot-Reload functionality and offers many benefits not present in esbuild
  • esbuild package doesn't support plugins, so we would need to setup it anyway

In production, we'll use elixir-nodejs for SSR. If you don't need SSR, you can disable it with one line of code. TypeScript will be supported as well.

Steps

  1. Please install node 😉

  2. Add live_vue to your list of dependencies of your Phoenix app in mix.exs and run mix deps.get

defp deps do
  [
    {:live_vue, "~> 0.5"}
  ]
end
  1. Add config entry to your config/dev.exs file
config :live_vue,
  vite_host: "http://localhost:5173",
  ssr_module: LiveVue.SSR.ViteJS,
  # if you want to disable SSR by default, make it false
  ssr: true
  1. Add config entry to your config/prod.exs file
config :live_vue,
  ssr_module: LiveVue.SSR.NodeJS,
  ssr: true
  1. Add LiveVue to your html_helpers in lib/my_app_web.ex
defp html_helpers do
  quote do
    # ...
    # Add support to Vue components
    use LiveVue

    # Generate component for each vue file, so you can omit v-component="name".
    # You can configure path to your components by using optional :vue_root param
    use LiveVue.Components, vue_root: ["./assets/vue", "./lib/my_app_web"]
  end
end
  1. LiveVue comes with a handy command to setup all the required files. It won't alter any files you already have in your project, you need to adjust them on your own by looking at the provided sources. Additional instructions how to adjust package.json can be found at the end of this page.

It will create:

  • package.json
  • vite, typescript and postcss configs
  • server entrypoint
  • vue entrypoint
mix deps.get
mix live_vue.setup
cd assets && npm install

Now we just have to adjust js/app.js hooks and tailwind config to include vue files:

// app.js
import topbar from "topbar" // instead of ../vendor/topbar
import {getHooks} from "live_vue"
import liveVueApp from "../vue"

// remember to import your css here
import "../css/app.css"

let liveSocket = new LiveSocket("/live", Socket, {
    // ...
    hooks: getHooks(liveVueApp),
})
// tailwind.config.js

module.exports = {
    content: [
        // ...
        // include Vue files
        "./vue/**/*.vue",
        "../lib/**/*.vue",
    ],
}
  1. Let's update root.html.heex to use Vite files in development. There's a handy wrapper for it.
<!-- Wrap existing CSS and JS in LiveVue.Reload.vite_assets component,
pass paths to original files in assets -->

<LiveVue.Reload.vite_assets assets={["/js/app.js", "/css/app.css"]}>
  <link phx-track-static rel="stylesheet" href="/assets/app.css" />
  <script type="module" phx-track-static type="text/javascript" src="/assets/app.js">
  </script>
</LiveVue.Reload.vite_assets>
  1. Update mix.exs aliases and get rid of tailwind and esbuild packages
defp aliases do
  [
    setup: ["deps.get", "assets.setup", "assets.build"],
    "assets.setup": ["cmd --cd assets npm install"],
    "assets.build": [
      "cmd --cd assets npm run build",
      "cmd --cd assets npm run build-server"
    ],
    "assets.deploy": [
      "cmd --cd assets npm run build",
      "cmd --cd assets npm run build-server",
      "phx.digest"
    ]
  ]
end

defp deps do
  [
    # remove these lines, we don't need esbuild or tailwind here anymore
    # {:esbuild, "~> 0.8", runtime: Mix.env() == :dev},
    # {:tailwind, "~> 0.2", runtime: Mix.env() == :dev},
  ]
end

  1. Remove esbuild and tailwind config from config/config.exs

  2. Update watchers in config/dev.exs to look like this

config :my_app, MyAppWeb.Endpoint,
  # ...
  watchers: [
    npm: ["--silent", "run", "dev", cd: Path.expand("../assets", __DIR__)]
  ]
  1. To make SSR working with LiveVue.SSR.NodeJS (recommended for production), you have to add this entry to your application.ex supervision tree:
children = [
  {NodeJS.Supervisor, [path: LiveVue.SSR.NodeJS.server_path(), pool_size: 4]},
  # ...
]
  1. Confirm everything is working by rendering an example Vue component anywhere in your LiveViews:
~H"""
<.vue
  count={@count}
  v-component="Counter"
  v-socket={@socket}
  v-on:inc={JS.push("inc")}
/>
"""
  1. (Optional) enable stateful hot reload of phoenix LiveViews - it allows for stateful reload across the whole stack 🤯. Just adjust your dev.exs to look like this - add notify section and remove live|components from patterns.
# Watch static and templates for browser reloading.
config :my_app, MyAppWeb.Endpoint,
  live_reload: [
    notify: [
      live_view: [
        ~r"lib/my_app_web/core_components.ex$",
        ~r"lib/my_app_web/(live|components)/.*(ex|heex)$"
      ]
    ],
    patterns: [
      ~r"priv/static/(?!uploads/).*(js|css|png|jpeg|jpg|gif|svg)$",
      ~r"lib/my_app_web/controllers/.*(ex|heex)$"
    ]
  ]

Voila! Easy, isn't it? 😉

Adjust your own package.json

Install these packages

cd assets

# vite
npm install -D vite @vitejs/plugin-vue

# tailwind
npm install -D tailwindcss autoprefixer postcss @tailwindcss/forms

# typescript
npm install -D typescript vue-tsc

# runtime dependencies
npm install --save vue topbar ../deps/live_vue ../deps/phoenix ../deps/phoenix_html ../deps/phoenix_live_view

# remove topbar from vendor, since we'll use it from node_modules
rm vendor/topbar.js

and add these scripts used by watcher and mix assets.build command

{
    "private": true,
    "type": "module",
    "scripts": {
        "dev": "vite --host -l warn",
        "build": "vue-tsc && vite build",
        "build-server": "vue-tsc && vite build --ssr js/server.js --out-dir ../priv/vue --minify esbuild --ssrManifest && echo '{\"type\": \"module\" } ' > ../priv/vue/package.json"
    }
}

Troubleshooting

Typescript error

There's a known bug where recent version of TS is not compatible with latest version of vue-tsc. If you're getting

Search string not found: "/supportedTSExtensions = .*(?=;)/"
(Use `node --trace-uncaught ...` to show where the exception was thrown)

Node.js v22.2.0
** (exit) 1

then you'd need to downgrade typescript and vue-tsc to versions 5.5.4 and 2.10.0 respectively.

You can do it by running

npm install typescript@5.5.4 vue-tsc@2.10.0