Ten Aurelia 2 Features You've Probably Never Used
Counting with repeat.for, comparing against the previous item, template variables, promises in markup, portals, two-way focus, key modifiers, and a few more small things that save you writing code.
Dwayne Charrington is a developer, musician and author who has been on the Aurelia team since 2015. He is the author of the books Aurelia For Real World Web Applications and The Aurelia 2 Book .
Counting with repeat.for, comparing against the previous item, template variables, promises in markup, portals, two-way focus, key modifiers, and a few more small things that save you writing code.
Aurelia 2 doesn't diff your view model or run a digest loop. It swaps properties for getters and setters, tracks getters with a proxy, patches collection methods, and falls back to polling only when it has no other choice. Here's how each piece works, and the changes it can't see.
if, repeat, with and promise are ordinary custom attributes with one flag set. Here's how they work, and how to build your own: one that renders content while a media query matches, and one that adds a variable to its template.
Two release candidates shipped this year without a blog post. Eager route loading, IContextRouter, Vite 8 support, reactive destructuring in repeat.for, and nearly 40 changes in total.
A practical guide to testing Aurelia 2 apps with Vitest and @aurelia/testing: setting up jsdom, rendering components with createFixture, waiting for the DOM with tasksSettled, swapping DI registrations for fakes, and testing routed components.
Navigate from /users/1 to /users/2 and Aurelia throws your component away and builds a new one. Here's why: how the router turns a URL into a route tree, how viewports claim components, the order the hooks run in, and how transition plans decide what gets reused.
@aurelia/storybook 3.0.0 is out. The renderer boilerplate is gone, your bindables become controls automatically, and autodocs, CSF Factories, and portable stories all work.
Aurelia now has a public skills repository for Claude Code, Codex, and other AI coding agents.
Plenty of open source projects are closing the door on AI contributions. Aurelia is not one of them. Here is what we expect instead.
Reviewey (reviewey.com.au) runs Aurelia 2 across every logged-in admin and member screen, on top of a WordPress and custom application stack. Here is why the Australian review platform chose Aurelia 2 over React, and what it gained.