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Simply React

A simple react starter kit heavily inspired by erikras's react-redux-universal-hot-example but with removed unnecessary features like API server and some back-end capabilities to reduce boiler plate learning curve (you need to study a boiler plate before you are able to unleash its potential, don't you?) and of course to reduce app size, thus, better performance.

This is for you if you just need a front-end app that gathers data only from external sources, or even a static app, then you wont have unnecessary code and resources for things like API server or real-time capabilities. I will post the benchmark numbers later! In one word, it's Simple!

Under active development!

I'm currently analyzing which features will be removed or adjusted. The main feature I'm focusing right now is the compatibility with react-router@^4.0.0.

Features to be removed (more coming):

  • API server
  • Socket
  • FeathersJs

Features to be added:

  • react-router v4
  • better code splitting
  • better SSR async prefetch

Build Status Dependency Status devDependency Status

About

This is a starter boilerplate app I've put together using the following technologies:

I cobbled this together from a wide variety of similar "starter" repositories. As I post this in June 2015, all of these libraries are right at the bleeding edge of web development. They may fall out of fashion as quickly as they have come into it, but I personally believe that this stack is the future of web development and will survive for several years. I'm building my new projects like this, and I recommend that you do, too.

Features

Hot reload
Enjoy the developer experience! Your saved changes to the CSS and JS are reflected instantaneously without refreshing the page ! On the server as on the client. Preserving the state of application on the client.
Next generation JavaScript
Use JSX syntax with all ES6 features, and some of ES7 (see .babelrc).
CSS in modules
Write composable, modular and maintenable CSS with your components.
Predictable state management
Unidirectional data flow with Redux helps you write applications that behave consistently and are easy to test. On top of that, it provides a great developer experience.
Backend API oriented services
With Feathers it's easy to create scalable real-time applications with services and hooks. Cross cutting concerns are an extremely powerful part of aspect oriented programming. They are a very good fit for web and mobile applications since the majority are primarily CRUD applications with lots of shared functionality. You can create before and after hooks and chain them together to create very complex processes while still maintaining modularity and flexibility.
Authentication
Passport authentication allows you to use all the desired strategies. The connections in REST and in real time are protected in the same way with the hooks. React-router, redux and redux-auth-wrapper allow you to keep control in your React app.
Progressive wep app & Offline-first
Progressive Web Apps are user experiences that have the reach of the web, and are:
Reliable - Load instantly and never show the downasaur, even in uncertain network conditions.
Fast - Respond quickly to user interactions with silky smooth animations and no janky scrolling.
Engaging - Feel like a natural app on the device, with an immersive user experience.

This new level of quality allows Progressive Web Apps to earn a place on the user's home screen.
Lazy loading & dynamic routing
The code splitting makes the size of your main bundle almost fixed, and with react-router you can load application pieces on demand. You can send bundles to people who are only trained, such as administration.
Universal rendering
With the help of server side rendering the first rendering is never empty and performance is better. This is the time for example to prefetch the data. Webpack-isomorphic-tools to allow require() work for statics both on client and server.
SEO
This project supports SEO for search engines even without support indexing of JavaScript content, thanks to server-side rendering.

Installation

npm install

Running Dev Server

npm run dev

The first time it may take a little while to generate the first webpack-assets.json and complain with a few dozen [webpack-isomorphic-tools] (waiting for the first Webpack build to finish) printouts, but be patient. Give it 30 seconds.

Using Redux DevTools

Redux Devtools are enabled by default in development.

If you have the Redux DevTools chrome extension installed it will automatically be used on the client-side instead.

If you want to disable the dev tools during development, set __DEVTOOLS__ to false in /webpack/dev.config.js.
DevTools are not enabled during production by default.

Building and Running Production Server

npm run build
npm run start

Demo

A demonstration of this app can be seen running on heroku, which is a deployment of the heroku branch.

Explanation

What initially gets run is bin/server.js, which does little more than enable ES6 and ES7 awesomeness in the server-side node code. It then initiates server.js. In server.js we proxy any requests to /api/* to the API server, running at localhost:3030. All the data fetching calls from the client go to /api/*. Aside from serving the favicon and static content from /static, the only thing server.js does is initiate delegate rendering to react-router. At the bottom of server.js, we listen to port 3000 and initiate the API server.

Routing and HTML return

The primary section of server.js generates an HTML page with the contents returned by react-router. First we instantiate an ApiClient, a facade that both server and client code use to talk to the API server. On the server side, ApiClient is given the request object so that it can pass along the session cookie to the API server to maintain session state. We pass this API client facade to the redux middleware so that the action creators have access to it. You can also use app for RESTful calls to api.

Then we perform server-side data fetching, wait for the data to be loaded, and render the page with the now-fully-loaded redux state.

The last interesting bit of the main routing section of server.js is that we swap in the hashed script and css from the webpack-assets.json that the Webpack Dev Server – or the Webpack build process on production – has spit out on its last run. You won't have to deal with webpack-assets.json manually because webpack-isomorphic-tools take care of that.

We also spit out the redux state into a global window.__data variable in the webpage to be loaded by the client-side redux code.

Server-side Data Fetching

The redux-connect package exposes an API to return promises that need to be fulfilled before a route is rendered. It exposes a <ReduxAsyncConnect /> container, which wraps our render tree on both server and client. More documentation is available on the redux-connect page.

Client Side

The client side entry point is reasonably named client.js. All it does is load the routes, initiate react-router, rehydrate the redux state from the window.__data passed in from the server, and render the page over top of the server-rendered DOM. This makes React enable all its event listeners without having to re-render the DOM.

Redux Middleware

The middleware, clientMiddleware.js, serves two functions:

  1. To allow the action creators access to the client API facade. Remember this is the same on both the client and the server, and cannot simply be imported because it holds the cookie needed to maintain session on server-to-server requests.
  2. To allow some actions to pass a "promise generator", a function that takes the API client and returns a promise. Such actions require three action types, the REQUEST action that initiates the data loading, and a SUCCESS and FAILURE action that will be fired depending on the result of the promise. There are other ways to accomplish this, some discussed here, which you may prefer, but to the author of this example, the middleware way feels cleanest.

Redux Modules... What the Duck?

The src/redux/modules folder contains "modules" to help isolate concerns within a Redux application (aka Ducks, a Redux Style Proposal that I came up with). I encourage you to read the Ducks Docs and provide feedback.

Getting data and actions into components

To understand how the data and action bindings get into the components – there's only one, InfoBar, in this example – I'm going to refer to you to the Redux library. The only innovation I've made is to package the component and its wrapper in the same js file. This is to encapsulate the fact that the component is bound to the redux actions and state. The component using InfoBar needn't know or care if InfoBar uses the redux data or not.

Images

Now it's possible to render the image both on client and server. Please refer to issue #39 for more detail discussion, the usage would be like below (super easy):

let logoImage = require('./logo.png');

Styles

This project uses local styles using css-loader. The way it works is that you import your stylesheet at the top of the render() function in your React Component, and then you use the classnames returned from that import. Like so:

render() {
const styles = require('./App.scss');
...

Then you set the className of your element to match one of the CSS classes in your SCSS file, and you're good to go!

<div className={styles.mySection}> ... </div>

Alternative to Local Styles

If you'd like to use plain inline styles this is possible with a few modifications to your webpack configuration.

1. Configure Isomorphic Tools to Accept CSS

In webpack-isomorphic-tools.js add css to the list of style module extensions

    style_modules: {
      extensions: ['less','scss','css'],

2. Add a CSS loader to webpack dev config

In dev.config.js modify module loaders to include a test and loader for css

  module: {
    loaders: [
      { test: /\.css$/, loader: 'style-loader!css-loader'},

3. Add a CSS loader to the webpack prod config

You must use the ExtractTextPlugin in this loader. In prod.config.js modify module loaders to include a test and loader for css

  module: {
    loaders: [
      { test: /\.css$/, loader: ExtractTextPlugin.extract('style-loader', 'css-loader')},

Now you may simply omit assigning the required stylesheet to a variable and keep it at the top of your render() function.

render() {
require('./App.css');
require('aModule/dist/style.css');
...

NOTE In order to use this method with scss or less files one more modification must be made. In both dev.config.js and prod.config.js in the loaders for less and scss files remove

  1. modules
  2. localIdentName...

Before:

{ test: /\.less$/, loader: 'style!css?modules&importLoaders=2&sourceMap&localIdentName=[local]___[hash:base64:5]!autoprefixer?browsers=last 2 version!less?outputStyle=expanded&sourceMap' },

After:

{ test: /\.less$/, loader: 'style!css?importLoaders=2&sourceMap!autoprefixer?browsers=last 2 version!less?outputStyle=expanded&sourceMap' },

After this modification to both loaders you will be able to use scss and less files in the same way as css files.

Unit Tests

The project uses Jest and Mocha to run your unit tests, it uses Karma as the test runner, it enables the feature that you are able to render your tests to the browser (e.g: Firefox, Chrome etc.), which means you are able to use the Test Utilities from Facebook api like renderIntoDocument().

To run the tests in the project, just simply run npm test if you have Chrome installed, it will be automatically launched as a test service for you.

To keep watching your test suites that you are working on, just set singleRun: false in the karma.conf.js file. Please be sure set it to true if you are running npm test on a continuous integration server (travis-ci, etc).

Deployment on Heroku

To get this project to work on Heroku, you need to:

  1. Remove the "PORT": 8080 line from the betterScripts / start-prod section of package.json.
  2. heroku config:set NODE_ENV=production
  3. heroku config:set NODE_PATH=./src
  4. heroku config:set NPM_CONFIG_PRODUCTION=false
  • This is to enable webpack to run the build on deploy.

The first deploy might take a while, but after that your node_modules dir should be cached.

FAQ

This project moves fast and has an active community, so if you have a question that is not answered below please file an issue.

Roadmap

Although this isn't a library, we recently started versioning to make it easier to track breaking changes and emerging best practices.

Contributing

I am more than happy to accept external contributions to the project in the form of feedback, bug reports and even better - pull requests :)

If you would like to submit a pull request, please make an effort to follow the guide in CONTRIBUTING.md.

Thanks for checking this out.

Created by: – Erik Rasmussen, @erikras

Maintened by: – Kévin Berthommier, @bertho-zero

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A simple react starter kit that just does it all.

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