React Redux Starter Kit

Want Semicolons?

After installing npm dependencies, open .eslintrc, change the semi rule from never to always, and then run npm run lint:fix -- Easy as that! Alternatively, use the same npm script after installing and extending your preferred ESLint configuration; it's easy to customize the project's code style to suit your team's needs. See, we can coexist peacefully.

This starter kit is designed to get you up and running with a bunch of awesome new front-end technologies, all on top of a configurable, feature-rich webpack build system that's already setup to provide hot reloading, CSS modules with Sass support, unit testing, code coverage reports, bundle splitting, and a whole lot more.

The primary goal of this project is to remain as unopinionated as possible. Its purpose is not to dictate your project structure or to demonstrate a complete sample application, but to provide a set of tools intended to make front-end development robust, easy, and, most importantly, fun. Check out the full feature list below!

Table of Contents

1. Requirements
2. Features
3. Getting Started
4. Usage
5. CLI Generators
6. Structure
7. Webpack
8. Server
9. Styles
10. Testing
11. Deployment
12. Troubleshooting

Requirements

• node ^4.2.0
• npm ^3.0.0

Features

• React (^0.14.0)
• Redux (^3.0.0)
  • react-redux (^4.0.0)
  • redux-devtools
  • redux-thunk middleware
• react-router (^2.0.0)
• react-router-redux (^4.0.0)
• Webpack
  • Bundle splitting and CSS extraction
  • Sass w/ CSS modules, autoprefixer, and minification
• Koa (^2.0.0-alpha)
• Karma
  • Mocha w/ chai, sinon-chai, and chai-as-promised, and chai-enzyme
  • PhantomJS
  • Code coverage reports/instrumentation with isparta
• Flow (^0.22.0)
• Babel (^6.3.0)
  • react-transform-hmr hot reloading for React components
  • redbox-react visible error reporting for React components
  • babel-plugin-transform-runtime so transforms aren't inlined
  • babel-plugin-transform-react-constant-elements save some memory allocation
  • babel-plugin-transform-react-remove-prop-types remove PropTypes
• ESLint
  • Uses Standard Style by default, but you're welcome to change this.

Getting Started

Just clone the repo and install the necessary node modules:

$ git clone https://github.com/davezuko/react-redux-starter-kit.git
$ cd react-redux-starter-kit
$ npm install                   # Install Node modules listed in ./package.json (may take a while the first time) 
$ npm start                     # Compile and launch 

Starting a New Project

First, I highly suggest checking out a new project by SpencerCDixon: redux-cli. This tool integrates extremely well with this project and offers added benefits such as generators (components, redux modules, etc.) and config/template management. It's still a work in progress, but give it a shot and file bugs to help make the project more robust.

Alternatively, if you just want to stick with this project and want to start a fresh project without having to clean up the example code in master, you can do the following after cloning the repo:

git fetch origin new-project                      # Make sure you've fetched the latest copy of this branch from remote 
git checkout new-project                          # Checkout the new-project branch 
$ rm -rf .git && git init                         # Start a new git repository 

Great, you now have a fresh project! There are a few titles you'll probably want to update, and then you're good to go:

• ~/package.json - package name
• ~/src/index.html - template title tag

Usage

Before delving into the descriptions of each available npm script, here's a brief summary of the three which will most likely be your bread and butter:

• Doing live development? Use npm start to spin up the dev server.
• Compiling the application to disk? Use npm run compile.
• Deploying to an environment? npm run deploy can help with that.

NOTE: This package makes use of debug to improve your debugging experience. For convenience, all of messages are prefixed with app:*. If you'd like to to change what debug statements are displayed, you can override the DEBUG environment variable via the CLI (e.g. DEBUG=app:* npm start) or tweak the npm scripts (betterScripts in package.json).

Great, now that introductions have been made here's everything in full detail:

NOTE: Deploying to a specific environment? Make sure to specify your target NODE_ENV so webpack will use the correct configuration. For example: NODE_ENV=production npm run compile will compile your application with ~/build/webpack/_production.js.

Configuration

Basic project configuration can be found in ~/config/_base.js. Here you'll be able to redefine your src and dist directories, adjust compilation settings, tweak your vendor dependencies, and more. For the most part, you should be able to make changes in here without ever having to touch the webpack build configuration.

If you need environment-specific overrides (useful for dynamically setting API endpoints, for example), create a file with the name of target NODE_ENV prefixed by an _ in ~/config (e.g. ~/config/_production.js). This can be entirely arbitrary, such as NODE_ENV=staging where the config file is ~/config/_staging.js.

Common configuration options:

CLI Generators

This project integrates with Redux CLI out of the box. If you used it to generate this project you have immediate access to the generators listed below (if you cloned/forked the project you have these features as well, but make sure to install the CLI first!).

NOTE: redux-form is not a dependency by default. If you wish to use it make sure to npm i --save redux-form, or if you wish to modify the skeleton you can update the blueprint in ~/blueprints/form/files/....

All of these blueprints are available (and can be overriden) in the ~/blueprints folder so you can customize the default generators for your project's specific needs. If you have an existing app you can run redux init to set up the CLI, then make sure to copy over the blueprints folder in this project for starter-kit specific generators.

See the Redux CLI github repo for more information on how to create and use blueprints.

Structure

The folder structure provided is only meant to serve as a guide, it is by no means prescriptive. It is something that has worked very well for me and my team, but use only what makes sense to you.

.
├── bin                      # Build/Start scripts
├── blueprints               # Blueprint files for redux-cli
├── build                    # All build-related configuration
│   └── webpack              # Environment-specific configuration files for webpack
├── config                   # Project configuration settings
├── interfaces               # Type declarations for Flow
├── server                   # Koa application (uses webpack middleware)
│   └── main.js              # Server application entry point
├── src                      # Application source code
│   ├── components           # Generic React Components (generally Dumb components)
│   ├── containers           # Components that provide context (e.g. Redux Provider)
│   ├── layouts              # Components that dictate major page structure
│   ├── redux                # Redux-specific pieces
│   │   ├── modules          # Collections of reducers/constants/actions
│   │   └── utils            # Redux-specific helpers
│   ├── routes               # Application route definitions
│   ├── static               # Static assets (not imported anywhere in source code)
│   ├── styles               # Application-wide styles (generally settings)
│   ├── views                # Components that live at a route
│   └── main.js              # Application bootstrap and rendering
└── tests                    # Unit tests

Components vs. Views vs. Layouts

TL;DR: They're all components.

This distinction may not be important for you, but as an explanation: A Layout is something that describes an entire page structure, such as a fixed navigation, viewport, sidebar, and footer. Most applications will probably only have one layout, but keeping these components separate makes their intent clear. Views are components that live at routes, and are generally rendered within a Layout. What this ends up meaning is that, with this structure, nearly everything inside of Components ends up being a dumb component.

Webpack

Vendor Bundle

You can redefine which packages to bundle separately by modifying compiler_vendor in ~/config/_base.js. These default to:

[
  'history',
  'react',
  'react-redux',
  'react-router',
  'react-router-redux',
  'redux'
]

Webpack Root Resolve

Webpack is configured to make use of resolve.root, which lets you import local packages as if you were traversing from the root of your ~/src directory. Here's an example:

// current file: ~/src/views/some/nested/View.js
 
// What used to be this:
import SomeComponent from '../../../components/SomeComponent'
 
// Can now be this:
import SomeComponent from 'components/SomeComponent' // Hooray!

Globals

These are global variables available to you anywhere in your source code. If you wish to modify them, they can be found as the globals key in ~/config/_base.js. When adding new globals, also add them to ~/.eslintrc.

Server

This starter kit comes packaged with an Koa server. It's important to note that the sole purpose of this server is to provide webpack-dev-middleware and webpack-hot-middleware for hot module replacement. Using a custom Koa app in place of webpack-dev-server will hopefully make it easier for users to extend the starter kit to include functionality such as back-end API's, isomorphic/universal rendering, and more -- all without bloating the base boilerplate. Because of this, it should be noted that the provided server is not production-ready. If you're deploying to production, take a look at the deployment section.

Styles

Both .scss and .css file extensions are supported out of the box and are configured to use CSS Modules. After being imported, styles will be processed with PostCSS for minification and autoprefixing, and will be extracted to a .css file during production builds.

NOTE: If you're importing styles from a base styles directory (useful for generic, app-wide styles), you can make use of the styles alias, e.g.:

// current file: ~/src/components/some/nested/component/index.jsx
import 'styles/core.scss' // this imports ~/src/styles/core.scss

Furthermore, this styles directory is aliased for sass imports, which further eliminates manual directory traversing; this is especially useful for importing variables/mixins.

Here's an example:

// current file: ~/src/styles/some/nested/style.scss 
// what used to be this (where base is ~/src/styles/_base.scss): 
@import '../../base';
 
// can now be this: 
@import 'base';

Testing

To add a unit test, simply create a .spec.js file anywhere in ~/tests. Karma will pick up on these files automatically, and Mocha and Chai will be available within your test without the need to import them. If you are using redux-cli, test files should automatically be generated when you create a component or redux module (duck).

Coverage reports will be compiled to ~/coverage by default. If you wish to change what reporters are used and where reports are compiled, you can do so by modifying coverage_reporters in ~/config/_base.js.

Deployment

Out of the box, this starter kit is deployable by serving the ~/dist folder generated by npm run compile (make sure to specify your target NODE_ENV as well). This project does not concern itself with the details of server-side rendering or API structure, since that demands an opinionated structure that makes it difficult to extend the starter kit. However, if you do need help with more advanced deployment strategies, here are a few tips:

If you are serving the application via a web server such as nginx, make sure to direct incoming routes to the root ~/dist/index.html file and let react-router take care of the rest. The Koa server that comes with the starter kit is able to be extended to serve as an API or whatever else you need, but that's entirely up to you.

Have more questions? Feel free to submit an issue or join the Gitter chat!

Troubleshooting

npm run dev:nw produces cannot read location of undefined.

This is most likely because the new window has been blocked by your popup blocker, so make sure it's disabled before trying again.

Reference: issue 110

Babel Issues

Running into issues with Babel? Babel 6 can be tricky, please either report an issue or try out the stable v0.18.1 release with Babel 5. If you do report an issue, please try to include relevant debugging information such as your node, npm, and babel versions.

Babel Polyfill

By default this repo does not bundle the babel polyfill in order to reduce bundle size. If you want to include it, you can use this commit from jokeyrhyme as a reference.

Internationalization Support

In keeping with the goals of this project, no internationalization support is provided out of the box. However, juanda99 has been kind enough to maintain a fork of this repo with internationalization support, check it out!

High editor CPU usage after compilation

While this is common to any sizable application, it's worth noting for those who may not know: if you happen to notice higher CPU usage in your editor after compiling the application, you may need to tell your editor not to process the dist folder. For example, in Sublime you can add:

    "folder_exclude_patterns": [".svn",	".git",	".hg", "CVS",	"node_modules",	"dist"]