A starter boilerplate for a universal webapp using express, react, redux, webpack, and react-transform
Once upon a time, this repo helped a lot of people, but it’s waaaay out of date. It’s now more of a historical artifact of what React development looked like in 2015.
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.
npm install
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.
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.
npm run build
npm run 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.
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 redux-async-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-async-connect 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:
import
ed 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.
This is where the meat of your server-side application goes. It doesn’t have to be implemented in Node or Express at all. This is where you connect to your database and provide authentication and session management. In this example, it’s just spitting out some json with the current time stamp.
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
modules
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.
The project uses 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).
To get this project to work on Heroku, you need to:
"PORT": 8080
line from the betterScripts
/ start-prod
section of package.json
.heroku config:set NODE_ENV=production
heroku config:set NODE_PATH=./src
heroku config:set NPM_CONFIG_PRODUCTION=false
The 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 visit our Discord channel or 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.
– Erik Rasmussen, @erikras