Originally published at: https://www.sitepoint.com/get-started-vuetify/
In this article, you will learn how you can quickly build an attractive and interactive frontend very quickly using Vuetify. Building a friendly application interface with a great user experience is a skill that requires practice and knowledge. While Vuetify won’t make you a skilled UX practitioner over night, it will help provide a solid start to those who are new in this area.
As a Vue.js developer, there are many fully-featured CSS frameworks specifically developed for Vue that you can take advantage of. One great example is Bootstrap-Vue. I have used it and and it does really make building components easier than just using traditional CSS frameworks. However, you may want to give your apps a Material Design look and feel to make it familiar to new users.
According to the makers of Material Design:
"Material Design isn't a single style. It's an adaptable design system inspired by paper and ink. And engineered so you can build beautiful, usable products faster."
I hope I now have your attention with that powerful statement. Currently, Vuetify is the most complete user interface component library for Vue applications that follows the Google Material Design specs. Let's quickly dive in and look at how you can get started.
Prerequisites
This guide is written for developers who have intermediate or advanced knowledge of Vue.js. If you have never used Vue.js to build applications, please check out these articles:
- Jump Start Vue, our complete introduction to Vue.js
- Getting Started with Vue.js — a quick primer
- Getting up and Running with the Vue.js 2.0 Framework
- More Vue.js Articles
What is Vuetify?
Vuetify is an open source MIT project for building user interfaces for web and mobile applications. It is a project that is backed by sponsors and volunteers from the Vue community. The project is supported by a vibrant Discord community forum where you can ask JavaScript questions — even if they're not about Vuetify. The development team is committed to fixing bugs and providing enhancements through consistent update cycles. There are also weekly patches to fix issues that the community raises.
Most open-source frontend libraries don't get this level of attention. So you can be confident that when you start using Vuetify in your projects, you won't be left hanging without support in the future. Vuetify supports all major browsers out of the box. Older browsers such as IE11 and Safari 9 can work too but will require babel-polyfill. Anything older than that is not supported. Vuetify is built to be semantic. This means that every component and prop name you learn will be easy to remember and re-use without frequently checking the documentation.
Vuetify also comes with free/premium themes and pre-made layouts you can use to quickly theme your application. At the time of writing, Vuetify v1.5.13 is the current version, which utilizes Material Design Spec v1. Version 2.x of Vuetify will utilize Material Design Spec v2 which will soon be made available. Let's go over to the next section to see a couple of ways we can install Vuetify into our projects.
Installing Vuetify
If you already have an existing Vue project that was created with an older version of Vue CLI tool or some other way, you can simply install Vuetify as follows: