Learn Alpine, Figma and Nightmare

OpenGraph images are the images you see when you paste a link into a social platform and it "unfurls" into an image, title, and description. This happens on Twitter, Discord, Slack, and many other platforms. This collection goes over everything from designing OpenGraph images in Figma, to implementing them in CodeSandbox, to returning headless browser screenshots from Netlify Functions, and finally using Cloudinary as a write-through cache. 

You will come away from this collection with the ability to ship an API that you can use on any of your sites, and also on-demand, that can generate images for not only OpenGraph unfurls, but also for Instagram, GitHub, and more. Using headless browsers with playwright to generate our images means we get full access to all the responsive power of CSS and all the logical power of JS to handle layout, importing assets like pngs, choosing different fonts, and more.

The image below is generated via the project you'll build and deploy in this course

![An example opengraph image](https://relaxed-payne-d1bfbe.netlify.com/opengraph?title=Building%20an%20OpenGraph%20image%20generation%20API%20with%20Cloudinary%20Netlify%20Functions%20and%20React&tags=figma,netlify%20functions,playwright&author=chrisbiscardi)

React is one of the web’s most popular frameworks for building JavaScript applications. 

If you know what you’re doing, React can drastically simplify how you build, use, and maintain code.

Whether you’re a React newbie or you’re ready for advanced techniques, you can level-up with egghead. Explore our in-depth courses, lessons, and community resources to build more powerful applications and crack open your career.

react

Building an OpenGraph image generation API with Cloudinary, Netlify Functions, and React

Welcome to this beginner level series on Alpine JS! 👋🏞

Alpine JS is a rugged, minimal framework for composing JavaScript behaviour in your markup. It brings declarative, reactive, data-driven nature of libraries like React or Vue to your HTML templates.

In this series, you will learn about Alpine's handy **directives**. You'll discover how to define a component scope with `x-data`, run code on mount with `x-init`, attach event listeners with `x-on`, display data with `x-text`, decide wether or not to show an element with `x-show`, iterate through data with `x-for`, retrieve a DOM element with `x-ref`, learn how to achieve _two-way data binding_ with `x-model`, and much more.

You'll also learn how **"modifiers"** can be applied and chained to directives to provide additional functionality: control the animation transition of entering and leaving DOM elements, debounce an event listener, etc.

We'll also touch on what Alpine calls **"magic properties"**, which give you access to native browser events (`$event`), reference to DOM elements (`$refs`), and more.

You'll gradually discover Alpine's API and syntax, from building simple tabs to a mini app that fetches a dog picture based on a "breed" search field. 🐶

**Get ready to breathe some fresh air** - it's time to walk into cool, green Alpine pastures! 🏞

Alpine.js offers you the reactive and declarative nature of big frameworks like Vue or React at a much lower cost.

You get to keep your DOM, and sprinkle in behavior as you see fit.

alpine

Sprinkle declarative, reactive behaviour on your HTML with Alpine JS

Figma is a collaborative prototyping tool that allows you to responsively design your applications, with resolution presets for all of the most popular devices. In this course, we will explore the fundamentals of Figma’s toolset that you can use for various design functions. 

We will start from scratch, then walk through scenarios you may encounter when designing a website or application. We will cover building reusable designs — known as “components” in Figma — all the way up to prototyping your designs to show screen transitions and animations between state. 

By the end of the course, you will understand the basics of Figma so you can use it to your advantage when building your next app or website.

Design, prototype, and gather feedback all in one place with Figma.

figma

The Beginner's Guide to Figma

Figma is a powerful design tool built with web technologies. Using the same technologies you can extend it with plugins.
You can use Typescript and/or javascript, you can load your favorite UI frameworks like Vue.js or React.js and build powerful plugins.

Using a plugin you can:

* Load Real Data from your server and visualize it 
* Change elements in your design programmatically 
* Convert your design to JSX or HTML, the sky is the limit

Learning these skills will help you make your design workflow faster by making Figma doing exactly what you want





JavaScript® (often shortened to JS) is a lightweight, interpreted, object-oriented language with first-class functions, most known as the scripting language for Web pages, but used in many non-browser environments as well such as node.js or Apache CouchDB. It is a prototype-based, multi-paradigm scripting language that is dynamic, and supports object-oriented, imperative, and functional programming styles.

javascript

Create a Figma Plugin Using Typescript

Nightmare is a high-level browser automation library.

The goal is to expose just a few simple methods, and have an API that feels synchronous for each block of scripting, rather than deeply nested callbacks. It's designed for automating tasks across sites that don't have APIs.

nightmare

Many pages you'll want to grab data from will require you to log in first. This video demonstrates how to log in and grab whatever data off the page you will need.

Scraping Data from Sites with Login Forms with Nightmare

Many websites have more than just simple static content. Dynamic content which is rendered by JavaScript requires browser to be able to scrape data. This video demonstrates how to use Nightmare (which is a wrapper around Electron) to launch a url and scrape dynamic data.

Scraping Dynamic JavaScript Websites with Nightmare

In this video, you will learn how to create frames (i.e. layouts) in Figma using the "frame" tool. This will allow you to get up and running quickly using pre-defined sizes.

Create a Mobile, Tablet and Desktop Frame in Figma

In this lesson, you will learn how to build a component in Figma, which is the equivalent to a "symbol" in Sketch. It's essentially a reusable piece of design. This will allow you to work more efficiently when designing your app.

Build Reusable Designs with Figma Components

In this lesson, you will learn how to use Figma's ellipse and pen tool to draw a simple clock icon. This will show you how to create vector-based graphics for your websites and apps.

Create a Simple Icon with Figma Ellipse and Pen Tool

In this lesson, you will learn how to add a reusable Figma component to multiple frames in your project. 

Add a Reusable Figma Component to Multiple Frames

In this lesson, you will learn how to duplicate grouped vectors to create a patterned logo in Figma. 

Duplicate Grouped Vectors to Create a Patterned Logo in Figma

In this video, you will learn how to establish your typography system for your project using Text Styles in Figma.

Establish a Typography System in Figma with Text Styles

In this video, you will learn how to create Color Styles, or a color palette so that you can reuse colors across various frames in your project in Figma.  

Create Figma Color Styles to Reuse Across Frames 

In this video, you will learn how to reuse Effects such as a drop shadow using Effect Styles in Figma. 

Reuse a Drop Shadow in Figma with Effect Styles

In this lesson, you will learn how to use Figma's prototyping feature to simulate a screen transition. This is a great feature to demo how users will interact with your app.

Prototype a Screen Transition in Figma

In this lesson, you will learn how to export frames in Figma to share with others. You will also learn how to share links so others can see your design happening in real-time.

Export and Share Figma Frames

In this video, you will learn how to bootstrap a Basic Figma plugin using the Figma app

Bootstrap a Figma Plugin

In this video, you will learn how to send and receive data from Figma to use it in your plugin

Communicate between the plugin and Figma 

In this video, you will learn how, in your plugin, to change the text value of a selected text node in Figma 

Change the text value of a select node

Now you have your plugin built and ready it's time to publish it.

In this video, you will learn to publish your Figma plugin to the public

Publish a Figma Plugin

Figma is a web-based collaborative interface design tool that we can use to prototype the look and feel of our OpenGraph cards. We dive into a few of the basic features using [Ryan Warner's](https://twitter.com/ryanwarnercodes) community [social branding templates](https://twitter.com/ryanwarnercodes/status/1239578329340170240), such as text placement, using the eyedropper and color tools, as well as pulling in gradients as images to fit our working area.

* [Social Branding Template](https://www.figma.com/community/file/820337605519256142)
* [Gradient Magic](https://www.gradientmagic.com/)

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