Vue continues to grow in popularity and is rapidly being adopted by many developers, and Vue.js tools are popping up everywhere. This is not without reason: Vue’s shallow learning curve, clear functionality-driven structure, and excellent documentation make it easy for novices to pick it up, and for more experienced developers to make a switch from other frameworks like React or Angular.
If you are serious about Vue development, sooner or later you’ll meet some fundamental tools and libraries which stand out from the crowd. Using them will level up your career as a Vue developer, and make you feel like a professional.
I’ve compiled a list of the most notable tools and libraries you should know and eventually use in your Vue.js projects. Unlike many other articles out there, which list only UI component libraries, this compilation explores a much broader mixture of tools, libraries, and plugins in the Vue ecosystem.
I’ve selected these based on their usefulness, effectiveness, and uniqueness — not their GitHub popularity or star ratings.
Enough talk: here they are, the top ten.
Vue CLI
It seems that having some kind of CLI tool is a must for every JavaScript application framework these days. Vue is no exception. Vue CLI is a fully-featured set of tools for rapid Vue development. Besides the usual project scaffolding, it allows you to experiment with new ideas even without creating a full project, by using its instant prototyping feature.
By default, Vue CLI offers support for the major web development tools and technologies, such as Babel, TypeScript, ESLint, PostCSS, PWA, Jest, Mocha, Cypress, and Nightwatch. This is possible thanks to its extensible plugin system. This means the community can build and share reusable plugins for common needs.
But the icing on the cake is the powerful GUI (Vue UI, which comes with the CLI) which allows you to create your project easily, and then configure and manage it along the way without the need for ejection.
➤ Vue CLI
VuePress
The next big player in Vue’s ecosystem is VuePress, a Vue-powered static site generator. Initially created as a tool for writing technical documentation, now it’s a small, compact, and powerful headless CMS. Since version 1.x, it has offered great blogging features and a powerful plugin system. It comes with a default theme (tailored to technical documentation), but you can also build custom themes or use a pre-made option from the community.
In VuePress, you write the content in Markdown, which is then transformed to pre-rendered static HTML files. Once those files are loaded, your site runs as a single-page application powered by Vue, Vue Router and Webpack.
One of the main benefits of VuePress is that you can include Vue code or components within your Markdown files. This gives you great power and flexibility because you can develop your site almost like a regular Vue app, with all benefits that come from that.
➤ VuePress
Gridsome
Gridsome has many similarities with VuePress but it takes a different and very powerful approach when dealing with data sources. It allows you to connect and use many different kinds of data in your app, which are then unified in one GraphQL layer. Basically, Gridsome uses Vue for front-end functionality and GraphQL for data management. The way this works can be summarized in the following three steps:
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