A starter boilerplate for a universal webapp using react, redux, express and feathers
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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.
yarn
yarn 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.
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.
yarn build
yarn start
A demonstration of this app can be seen running on heroku, which is a deployment of the heroku branch.
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.
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.
The redial 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 redial page.
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.
The middleware, clientMiddleware.js, serves two functions:
imported because it holds the cookie needed to maintain session on server-to-server requests.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.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.
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.
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');
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>
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
moduleslocalIdentName...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.
The project uses Jest to run your unit tests.
To run the tests in the project, just simply run yarn test if you have Chrome installed, it will be automatically launched as a test service for you.
To get this project to work on Heroku, you need to:
"PORT": 8080 line from the start-prod script of package.json.heroku config:set NODE_ENV=productionheroku config:set NODE_PATH=./srcheroku config:set NPM_CONFIG_PRODUCTION=falseThe first deploy might take a while, but after that your node_modules dir should be cached.
This project moves fast and has an active community, so if you have a question that is not answered below please file an issue.
Although this isn't a library, we recently started versioning to make it easier to track breaking changes and emerging best practices.
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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