Step 1: Set up

In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to build elements using Polymer 1.0. You’ll create a simple Polymer element, a toggle button. The finished button will look something like this:

You’ll be able to use it with simple markup like this:

<icon-toggle></icon-toggle>

This project introduces you to most of the key concepts in working with Polymer.

Don’t worry if you don’t understand everything. Each of the concepts presented here is described in detail in the Polymer documentation.

Step 1: Get set up

To follow this tutorial, you’ll need:

• The starting code.
• The Polymer CLI to run the demo.

Don’t want to install anything? To run through this tutorial online, follow the instruction in Step 1: No install version.

Download the starting code

1. Click the button to download the starting code as a ZIP file.

   Download ZIP

2. Expand the archive to create your project folder.

   Your project folder should look something like this:

   README.md
   bower.json
   bower_components/
   demo/
   icon-toggle-finished/
   icon-toggle.html
   

   The main file you’ll work with is icon-toggle.html, which contains the definition for your custom element.

Install Polymer CLI.

Install the Polymer CLI to serve the demo locally.

1. Install an active LTS version of Node.js (4.x or 6.x). The current version (7.x) should work, but is not officially supported.

2. Install git.

3. Install the latest version of Bower.

   npm install -g bower
   

4. Install Polymer CLI.

   npm install -g polymer-cli
   

Run the demo

To run the element demo:

1. Run polymer serve from the repo directory:

   polymer serve
   

2. Open localhost:8080/components/icon-toggle/demo/ in your browser.

   (Note that the path uses icon-toggle—the component name listed in this element’s bower.json file—rather than the actual directory name. If you’re wondering why polymer serve does this, see HTML imports and dependency management.)

   You’ll see some text where the icon toggles should appear. It doesn’t look very interesting, but it shows that everything is working.

If this text doesn’t appear, make sure you’re looking at the the demo folder itself, or at demo/index.html, not at toggle-icon.html or toggle-icon-demo.html.

If everything looks good, move on to step 2.

Step 2: Add local DOM

Step 1: No install version

To run through this tutorial online without installing anything:

1. Open the starter project on Plunker.

2. Click Fork to create your own working copy.

Continue to step 2.

Step 2: Add local DOM