React Starter Boilerplate

[DEPCREATED] Now I would recommend: For Server-side Rendering can use Next.js; For Client-side Rendering can use Create-React-App.

A starter kit for universal react app, this project is extends from ejected create-react-app.

Customization

• feature/without-immutablejs — rewrite redux code without immutablejs library

Motivation

The motivation is simple, Best Development Experience and App performance.

When you start a new react project, you need to do a lot of settings:

1. redux store and middlewares as the state management.
2. webpack config for development and production.
3. Enable Hot-reload.
4. Configure babel, eslint, jest and more...
5. If project gets bigger, you need to setup some plugins such as happypack, webpack-dll-plugin to reduce webpack build time.

And once app is online, you have to optimize the performance for production.

All of the settings are very complicated, and if you want to go server-side rendering, it will be more complicated.

So I created this project and covers all the above settings, let you can focus on writing components, handling data flow and business logic.

Uses

• react as the view.
• react-router v4 as the router.
• react-loadable provides component based code splitting
• react-helmet provides control of the page head from within components.
• redux as the state management container.
• redux-saga deal with asynchronous action flow.
• react-router-redux sync your router with redux state
• reselect to avoid frequent re-render that improve performance.
• styled-components helps you organize CSS in react project.
• font-awesome as the Icons
• babel v7 for es6+ support and load babel-polyfill on-demand.
• isomorphic-fetch for http request.

Features

Best Developer Expreience

• webpack v4 for both development and production bundles.
• webpack-DLL-plugin, cache-loader, happypack for faster rebuild time.
• react-hot-loader enable hot-reload both client and server-side.
• redux-devtools for state history, playback, enable Time travel (you can also use redux-devtools-extension instead).
• webpack-bundle-analyzer to review webpack output files with an interactive zoomable treemap.
• ESLint maintain your code quality with ease.
• Prettier keep code style consistency, it will performing code formatting when commit.

You can also install react-devtools, this is a browser extension made by facebook.

Production Ready

• Route and component level code splitting.
• Async inject reducer and saga that are on the page.
• Offline support via service-worker.
• Long-term browser caching support.
• 🔥 Streaming Server-sdie rendering with renderToNodeStream introduced in react v16
• Server-side cache To speed up SSR.

SEO Friendly

This is a SSR (Server-side Rendering) project, so web content can be crawlable, and we use react-helmet to inject meta tags into html head dynamically from within components, so social medias like Google Plus and Facebook can know your website's metadata.

Supported Language Features

This project supports all of the ES6 and ES7 syntax features.

Supported Style language

You can write css, less and scss, but I recommend you to use styled-components.

Let's Getting Started

First, install the node modules

npm install

or you can run yarn install

Then, run the following command, this will run the app in the development mode.

npm run dev

and you can open http://localhost:3000 to view it in the browser.

Available Scripts

In the project directory, you can also run:

npm run build:dll

Generate a DLL file stored in build/dll folder, this file bundles all of the third-party packages like react, redux, styled-components etc, so we don't need rebuild these module in dev, it will save a lot of webpack rebuild time that increase development efficiency.

npm run analyze

Generate stats.json and report.html in build folder, you can upload stats.json file on webpack.github.io/analyse/#hints or open report.html see bundle content.

npm run flow

Run the static type checker flow checkers to check your program.

npm run test

Launches the test runner in the interactive watch mode.

npm run build

Builds the app for production to the build folder.
It correctly bundles React in production mode and optimizes the build for the best performance.

npm run lint

Run ESLint (code quality tool) that checks for problems in your app code.

npm run start

Run your server with production build result.

Folder Structure

src: Your app code.

src/containers: Routing components such as Login, Home pages...

src/copomnents: Shared specific styling components such as Button, Form...

src/client: client-side entry point

src/server: server-side entry point

config: Settings for project build.

scripts: CLI commands.

Server-Side Rendering Data Flow

The data flow from server to client when received a http request, for more details you can see the code in src/server/server.js.

1. Runs matching of routes in react-router for server.
2. Extract all of the static preLoad methods from within components.
3. Makes async data fetching request.
4. Renders Route component to string.
5. Get styled-components style tags that are on page.
6. Get react-loadable chunks that are on page.
7. Generate HTML string (with Meta, Script, Style tags) and send to client.
8. Client-side receives html file with preload state from server.
9. Client-side initializes redux store with given state and render page.

How To Add Font-Awesome Icon

Since font-awesome v5 that give us a lot of benefits, we can inline the CSS directly into the page and load icon on-demand, you can add the icon you want.

1. �In the src/utils/font-awesome.js.
2. Import icon, ex: import faUser from '@fortawesome/fontawesome-free-solid/faUser'.
3. Add icon into library. fontawesome.library.add(faUser).

How To Remove Font-Awesome

1. Remove Line 14 in src/client/index.js.
2. Remove src/utils/font-awesome.js.
3. Remove all of the icons that used in React components.
4. Remove @fortawesome/fontawesome @fortawesome/fontawesome-free-brands @fortawesome/fontawesome-free-solid in the package.json dependencies.

How To Add Bootstrap

1. npm install bootstrap@v4.0.0 bootstrap-loader.
2. Set process.env.SHOULD_USE_BOOTSTRAP=true in config/webpack/index.js.
3. Bootstrap css and js will load into webpack bundle, now you can feel free to it.
4. You can also install reactstrap, its a bootstrap 4 components built for React.

Road map

• Call API demo.
• Authentication Route.
• Load font-awesome 5 with inline style tag (like styled-components).
• Deploy a demo site.
• Rewrite homepage (I'm not good at UI design and I know it's ugly, can anyone give me some suggestions).
• Beauty terminal output.
• Modularized.
• Write unit test for react components, reducers and sagas.

License

This project is licensed under the MIT license, For more information see LICENSE.