This was useful when many of the technologies had breaking changes and exciting new versions in alpha's/betas. With those being released now, I've archived this large repo to allow a new, smaller & cleaner, react-lego to emerge!
The building blocks of a react app
This repo demonstrates how to plug in other technologies, one block at a time, into React.
The concept is to use GitHub's branch-comparison screens to quickly demo the code changes that are needed for only the technology you are interested in.
A client-side React app which is fully tested and production ready on the master branch.
From Master, Server-side Rendering (SSR) has been added in the Koa and Express branches.
Every other branch then adds one more technology, with the smallest possible changes.
All branches, have been setup with continuous deployment.
All branches use babel v6, es2015, React v15.1, React-router v1, Webpack v1 unless otherwise stated
Each tech has its own branch, and in my experience, can be mixed and matched almost seamlessly!
The client-side apps are production ready and fully tested, they both use the following :
- CSS (Sass-loader, Autoprefixer)
- tests
- unit with Enzyme
- functional
- end-to-end with Nightwatch and BrowserStack
- smoke
- code coverage
- Code linting with eslint
- CI integration with CircleCI
- Continuous deployment with Heroku
All other branches include the above and are also production ready.
masterbranch
The react app uses react-router v2 for routing.
Because of Ben Fletcher and this tweet I thought i'd give Preact a shot.
Turns out it was actually very easy! After removing a few dependencies we swapped routers for preact-router.
Using Koa, the App now renders on the server, Compare Koa with Express.
With Async/Await around the corner and likely to be in Node v8, Koa 2 will soon come out of Alpha.
I've created a Koa v2 app to see how all the branches already mentioned come together in that setup.
Using Express, the App now renders on the server, Compare Express with Koa.
In the base branches, we have simply added the CSS into webpack entry array to get it to convert Scss into CSS.
these are some other ways to achieve more modular components:
>> More about the different CSS methods
Based on the
universalbranch compare branches
Import your css into your component and use the class names as they are written.
This method is the least obtrusive and feels most like traditional css.
You must manually take care of css scope using things like BEM or Smaccs.
Based on the
universalbranch compare branches
Import your css into your components and add the class names using js object notation. This method completely changes the css class names output. Scoping problems are gone, but you must specifically mark 'global' classes.
Based on the
universalbranch compare branches
import your css into your components as Javascript Objects.
Class names are a thing of the past as are scoping problems.
See how to upgrade from webpack v1 to v2
There are no code differences between Koa or Express when adding Webpack v2.
react-hot-loader allows you to see changes made to any part of your app without having to restart the server. We are currently using v3.
See the code changes needed to :
>> More about adding react-hot-loader
React Router v4 sees to be very close to being released so I was interested in how hard the upgrade would be. Easy, it seems - the new syntax includes a lot for JSX which is friendly and more flexible.
See the code changes needed to :
Redux was added with data being hydrated on the server.
With Redux, the example app now has an API which can be called to return the required data. This data is now formatted inside a reducer.
See the code changes needed to :
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reduxbranch. compare branches
This branch allows you to make async requests on the server and hydrate your redux store before rendering the page. The massive win here is that each container dictates what data it needs while still on the server.
>> More about adding Promise middleware
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reduxbranch. compare branches
Add Redux-DevTools to the app to help debugging.
>> More about adding redux-dev-tools
Based on the
universalbranch. compare branches
Using webpack-isomorphic-tools and svg-inline-loader we are able to directly import SVGs into our JavaScript. This has the added benefit of :
- Reusing SVG files (without code duplication)
- Keep SVGs inline and style them with CSS
- Serverside rendering of SVG's