How To: Get Started

Technologies Used

Lion Web Components aims to be future proof and use well-supported proven technology. The stack we have chosen should reflect this.

Checkout the documentation of our main stack.

• lit - Building on top of the Web Components standards, Lit adds just what you need to be happy and productive: reactivity, declarative templates and a handful of thoughtful features to reduce boilerplate and make your job easier.
• modern-web - Guides, tools and libraries for modern web development.
• open-wc - Open Web Components provides guides, tools and libraries for developing web components.

How to get started

Make sure you have npm, if you don't have it yet: get npm.

And create a repo, we suggest to use the generator from open-wc:

npm init @open-wc

Install lion packages

To get started with consuming lion's UI components install package @lion/ui as follows:

npm i @lion/ui

You can install lion's ajax package with:

npm i @lion/ajax

You can install lion's singleton-manager package with:

npm i --save singleton-manager

Extend a Web Component

This is the main use case for lion. To import component classes, and extend them for your own design system's components.

import { css } from 'lit';
import { LionInput } from '@lion/ui/input.js';

class MyInput extends LionInput {
  static get styles() {
    return [
      ...super.styles,
      css`
        /* your styles here */
      `,
    ];
  }
}
customElements.define('my-input', MyInput);

Use a JavaScript system

There's a couple of "systems" in lion which have a JavaScript API. Examples are localize, overlays, ajax, etc.

<script type="module">
  import { ajax } from '@lion/ajax';

  ajax
    .fetch('data.json')
    .then(response => response.json())
    .then(data => {
      // do something with the data
    });
</script>

Use a Web Component

You can also use the lion elements directly, although this is likely not a common use case.

<script type="module">
  import '@lion/ui/define/lion-input.js';
</script>

<lion-input name="firstName" label="First name"></lion-input>

Code Completion for VS Code

The @lion/ui package includes a file named vscode.html-custom-data.json that allows you to define custom elements to be recognized by Visual Studio Code. This enables code completion for @lion/ui components. To activate this feature, follow these steps after having installed @lion/ui:

1. Navigate to the root of your project
2. Add the following to root level of object in file .vscode/settings.json (create file if it doesn't exist):

  "html.customData": ["./node_modules/@lion/ui/vscode.html-custom-data.json"]

3. Restart your Visual Studio Code for the changes to take effect.