BlazorPWA.MSBuild 0.0.1-beta20190808-20

Blazor PWA Builder - MSBuild

The easiest way to turn your Client Side Blazor project into a Progressive Web App (PWA).

This project, when added to your build process, will generate the required files to enable basic PWA abilities for your project.

It generates a manifest.json, a Service Worker with pre-caching of all required files and an installer for the Service Worker.

It currently includes a simple banner to notify the user that your application can be installed, and a simple alert to notify users when your application has been updated.

This is to be considered a Beta release - I am looking for feedback/issues/requests.

Installation

Install the nuget BlazorPWA.MsBuild

Package Manager:

Install-Package BlazorPWA.MSBuild -Version 0.0.1-beta20190808-20

.NET Cli:

dotnet add package BlazorPWA.MSBuild --version 0.0.1-beta20190808-20

Package Reference

<PackageReference Include="BlazorPWA.MSBuild" Version="0.0.1-beta20190808-20"/>

Configuration

Required configuration: none *.

*Really! try it!

This PWA builder is constructed using MSBuild targets, which get installed in your .nuget cache.

You are free to inspect those targets and customise any part of the build by adding Properties to your csproj, or to a .props file in the source tree.

For example, by default, the PWA builder will only generate the PWA files once, which means, should you want to, you can add it to your project, build once - you will have the required files for a PWA and will be free to modify them to suit.

Should you want to re-generate the PWA files every build, you can add this Property to your csproj

<ServiceWorkerForce>true</ServiceWorkerForce>

When you want to publish an update to your app, you may need to supply a new browser cache version - if you don't change anything in the Service Worker the end user will not use your new code!

Note: PWAs update when they detect a change in the Service Worker code - this cache version number is used in the Service Worker, so updating the cache version number will trigger an update of the PWA for the end user. It's also important as the cache is where your code is stored - if you don't update the cache version, it will not refresh with your new code

<ServiceWorkerCacheVersion>2</ServiceWorkerCacheVersion>

The web manifest has properties for the application name, which are taken, by default, from your project and solution names, but you can override them

<ManifestShortName>My Project</ManifestShortName>

<ManifestLongName>My Really Great Project</ManifestLongName>

There are dozens of Properties in the targets files supplied by this package - you could customise them all, but you probably don't need to, so proceed with caution.

Roadmap

• At the moment, there is only one choice for caching strategy - Cache First/Network Fallback - I will add more (https://developers.google.com/web/ilt/pwa/introduction-to-progressive-web-app-architectures#caching_strategies_supported_by_sw-toolbox)
• The current methods for alerting the user are semi-hard coded (you can adjust them manually after generation) - this will change to allow hooks/callbacks into Blazor via project properties
• Document all of the configuration Properties (they all have comments in the code - so you are able to understand their purpose without documentation...)
• Bug fixes

Contribute

Please feel free to create issues, ask questions and submit Pull Requests.