Using PWABuilder to scaffold your PWA

PWABuilder is a progressive web application scaffolding tool built by the Microsoft Edge team and publicly hosted at https://pwabuilder.com. I love this tool because you can quickly scaffold the assets you need to upgrade any website to a progressive web app in less than a minute.

There are three steps to scaffolding the PWA components, which are generating a web manifest file, picking a simple service worker, and downloading the assets:

Let's check each of these steps in detail.

Generating a valid web manifest file

A valid web manifest file is one of the primary PWA requirements, but you would be surprised at how many sites miss this simple step. Most of them just forget an important field or to supply values that don't meet the guidelines, such as a long and short name value.

The biggest mistake is not including the minimum set of icons required by all the different browsers and operating systems.

To use the online tool, you need to supply a public URL,...