Introduction to File Uploads in Vue.js — Transcript

Transcript of the free Vue.js lesson Introduction to File Uploads in Vue.jswatch the video lesson.

File uploads are a common feature in web applications. They're useful for uploading all different kinds of files, things like images, videos, or documents. js application for uploading files. But before we dive into creating that component, let's take a high level overview of what it takes to get a file from your end user's browser to your server.

First, we need to create a UI for the user to select one or more files. Next, we should validate the files to make sure they are of the correct type and size directly on the client side so that we can provide the user feedback immediately if something isn't right. Next, we need to send the file or files over to the server. js application, this is most often done via an API request, via the fetch API or Axios.

Once we have the file on the server side, we should do some more validation since the client-side validation can be bypassed and then save the file to the file system or in a cloud storage bucket. In this course, we'll save the file to the file system using Nuxt and use storage. This is totally fine if you're running dedicated servers. For a serverless approach though, you would definitely need to save to a cloud storage bucket like AWS S3, CloudFlare R2, SuperBase Storage, and so on.

Finally, we need to send back the file URL or a unique identifier for the file. to the client. This is so that we can display the uploaded files to the user. And if we need to relate the file to some other data, we can save the URL to a database as a user avatar, a post image or whatever else we need.

So what part of this process can you expect to learn in this course? Well, we will build out the entire front end portion of this process. js file upload component that supports drag and drop, multiple file selection, preview of the uploaded files, error feedback, and a vModel to easily get or set the uploaded files from the consuming component. We won't code out the backend concerns by ourselves.

That will be included in the boilerplate code for this course. but I've left a link in the description below to an article that thoroughly covers how the backend uploads were handled, so you can check that out if you're interested. We'll also use the following technologies over the course of our lessons. js 3 and TypeScript to create a flexible, reusable, and type-safe component.

Next, we are using Nuxt 3 to create the server-side API endpoint to save the files. But if you're not familiar with Nuxt, don't worry, it's only a small part of the course. Most topics can easily transfer to other stacks that work with Vue. Finally, we'll use Tellwind CSS for styling.

Once again, don't worry if you're not familiar with Tellwind, we won't do much of the styling together in the videos, but rather I'll either rely on Cursor, which is an AI-powered IDE to help create some of these styles for us, or I'll just provide the styles for you at the end of the lesson that you can copy and paste in order to get a nice-looking result. The styling is not the point of this course. The point is how to handle the file uploads. Now, to get started, go ahead and download the starting point for the project from the boilerplate branch of the course repository.

I've left a link to this in the description below. It already has a working version of the file upload component in it. so that you can see the goal that we're working towards, and it also has the working API endpoint, as I already mentioned. During the course, we'll start the component again from scratch, but you can use the completed component as a reference.

By the end of the course, we might not have this exact component recreated, but we'll have something very similar. Ready to get started? Let's go. File uploads are a common feature in web applications.

They're useful for uploading all different kinds of files, things like images, videos, or documents. js application for uploading files. But before we dive into creating that component, let's take a high level overview of what it takes to get a file from your end user's browser to your server. First, we need to create a UI for the user to select one or more files.

Next, we should validate the files to make sure they are of the correct type and size directly on the client side so that we can provide the user feedback immediately if something isn't right. Next, we need to send the file or files over to the server. js application, this is most often done via an API request, via the fetch API or Axios. Once we have the file on the server side, we should do some more validation since the client-side validation can be bypassed and then save the file to the file system or in a cloud storage bucket.

In this course, we'll save the file to the file system using Nuxt and use storage. This is totally fine if you're running dedicated servers. For a serverless approach though, you would definitely need to save to a cloud storage bucket like AWS S3, CloudFlare R2, SuperBase Storage, and so on. Finally, we need to send back the file URL or a unique identifier for the file.

to the client. This is so that we can display the uploaded files to the user. And if we need to relate the file to some other data, we can save the URL to a database as a user avatar, a post image or whatever else we need. So what part of this process can you expect to learn in this course?

Well, we will build out the entire front end portion of this process. js file upload component that supports drag and drop, multiple file selection, preview of the uploaded files, error feedback, and a vModel to easily get or set the uploaded files from the consuming component. We won't code out the backend concerns by ourselves. That will be included in the boilerplate code for this course.

but I've left a link in the description below to an article that thoroughly covers how the backend uploads were handled, so you can check that out if you're interested. We'll also use the following technologies over the course of our lessons. js 3 and TypeScript to create a flexible, reusable, and type-safe component. Next, we are using Nuxt 3 to create the server-side API endpoint to save the files.

But if you're not familiar with Nuxt, don't worry, it's only a small part of the course. Most topics can easily transfer to other stacks that work with Vue. Finally, we'll use Tellwind CSS for styling. Once again, don't worry if you're not familiar with Tellwind, we won't do much of the styling together in the videos, but rather I'll either rely on Cursor, which is an AI-powered IDE to help create some of these styles for us, or I'll just provide the styles for you at the end of the lesson that you can copy and paste in order to get a nice-looking result.

The styling is not the point of this course. The point is how to handle the file uploads. Now, to get started, go ahead and download the starting point for the project from the boilerplate branch of the course repository. I've left a link to this in the description below.

It already has a working version of the file upload component in it. so that you can see the goal that we're working towards, and it also has the working API endpoint, as I already mentioned. During the course, we'll start the component again from scratch, but you can use the completed component as a reference. By the end of the course, we might not have this exact component recreated, but we'll have something very similar.

Ready to get started? Let's go.