About

refine offers lots of out-of-the box functionality for rapid development, without compromising extreme customizability. Use-cases include, but are not limited to admin panels, B2B applications and dashboards.

Documentation

For more detailed information and usage, refer to the refine documentation.

What is refine?

refine is a React-based framework for building internal tools, rapidly. :sparkles: It ships with Ant Design System, an enterprise-level UI toolkit.

Refine offers lots of out-of-the box functionality for rapid development, without compromising extreme customizability. Use-cases include, but are not limited to admin panels, B2B applications and dashboards.

What is a "headless" Framework?

refine is a headless React framework, which means all out-of-the-box features(Routing, Networking, Authentication, Authorization, State Management, Realtime, i18n, etc.), it can be used without being tied to any UI elements or framework. Also, Ant Design as out-of-the-box is supported.

• Customization & Extensibility - UI is a completely customizable area and each developer uses different solutions. refine features does not restrict or interfere with your UI structure. refine allows the you to design and customizable the UI based on their unique use case.

• Separation of Concerns - refine as a framework, is not responsible for your UI and is independent.

• Maintenance - By removing the API surface to support every UI use case, refine easy to use and update/maintain is simple.

Key features

🔥 Headless : Works with any UI framework

⚙️ Zero-configuration: One-line setup with superplate. It takes less than a minute to start a project.

📦 Out-of-the-box : Routing, networking, authentication, state management, i18n and UI.

🔌 Backend Agnostic : Connects to any custom backend. Built-in support for REST API, GraphQL, NestJs CRUD, Airtable, Strapi, Strapi v4, Strapi GraphQL, Supabase, Hasura, Appwrite, Firebase, Directus and Altogic.

📝 Native Typescript Core : You can always opt out for plain JavaScript.

🐜 Enterprise UI : Works seamlessly with Ant Design System. (Support for multiple UI frameworks is on the Roadmap)

📝 Boilerplate-free Code : Keeps your codebase clean and readable.

Motivation

Higher-level frontend frameworks can save you a lot time, but they typically offer you a trade-off between speed and flexibility.

After many years of experience in developing B2B frontend applications and working with popular frameworks, we came up with a new approach to tackle this dilemma. This is how refine is born.

refine is a collection of helper hooks, components and providers. They are all decoupled from your UI components and business logic, so they never keep you from customizing your UI or coding your own flow.

As refine is totally unopinionated about UI and logic, it's strongly opinionated about three parts of your application:

1. API Networking
2. State Management
3. Authentication & Authorization

We believe, these are the most important components of a data-intensive frontend application and should be handled in a robust way by leveraging industry best practices.

refine guarantees you a perfect implementation of these building blocks in your project, so you can focus on your development.

Architecture

refine makes extensive use of hooks as a default way for interacting with your components. Under the hood, refine relies heavily to React Query for data handling, caching and state management. Access to external sources and API's happen via providers which are basically plug-in type components for extendibility.

Benchmark

After releasing the first internal versions, we had the chance to migrate some of our React projects to refine. In addition to shorter development times and overall performance gains, we've measured significant reduction in project size.

refine makes your codebase significantly smaller, by eliminating redundant code such as reducers, actions and unit tests. Below is a size comparison for an example project:

Quick Start

Run the superplate tool with the following command:

npx superplate-cli -p refine-react tutorial

Follow the CLI wizard to select options and start creating your project.

After setup is complete, navigate to the project folder and start your project with:

npm run dev

Your refine application will be accessible at http://localhost:3000.

Replace the contents of App.tsx with the following code:

mport { Refine, useMany } from "@pankod/refine-core";
import {
    useTable,
    List,
    Table,
    DateField,
} from "@pankod/refine-antd";
import routerProvider from "@pankod/refine-react-router-v6";
import dataProvider from "@pankod/refine-simple-rest";

import "@pankod/refine-antd/dist/styles.min.css";

const App: React.FC = () => {
    return (
        <Refine
            routerProvider={routerProvider}
            dataProvider={dataProvider("https://api.fake-rest.refine.dev")}
            resources={[{ name: "posts", list: PostList }]}
        />
    );
};

export const PostList: React.FC = () => {
    const { tableProps } = useTable<IPost>();

    const categoryIds =
        tableProps?.dataSource?.map((item) => item.category.id) ?? [];

    const { data, isLoading } = useMany<ICategory>({
        resource: "categories",
        ids: categoryIds,
        queryOptions: {
            enabled: categoryIds.length > 0,
        },
    });

    return (
        <List>
            <Table<IPost> {...tableProps} rowKey="id">
                <Table.Column dataIndex="title" title="title" />
                <Table.Column
                    dataIndex={["category", "id"]}
                    title="category"
                    render={(value: number) => {
                        if (isLoading) {
                            return "loading...";
                        }

                        return data?.data.find(
                            (item: ICategory) => item.id === value,
                        )?.title;
                    }}
                />
                <Table.Column
                    dataIndex="createdAt"
                    title="createdAt"
                    render={(value) => <DateField format="LLL" value={value} />}
                />
            </Table>
        </List>
    );
};

export default App;

interface IPost {
    title: string;
    createdAt: string;
    category: { id: number };
}

interface ICategory {
    id: number;
    title: string;
}

Roadmap

You can find Refine's Public Roadmap here!

Stargazers

Contribution

If you have a bug to report, do not hesitate to file an issue.

If you are willing to fix an issue or propose a feature; all PRs with clear explanations are welcome and encouraged.

License

Licensed under the MIT License, Copyright © 2021-present Pankod

Special Thanks

React Admin has been a great source of ideas and inspiration for refine. Big thanks to friends at Marmelab for the amazing work they are doing.