Presentation

Hi my dear loving world !

What you will find here is another simple React starter kit. I already hear you saying "Borring... NEXT !". Indeed. I totally agree ! Buuuuut, if you want to give it a chance to start a simple and lightweight React project, be my guest, I hope it will fit to your needs.

Motivation

I started to work on a React project which was already well advanced and I was frustrated to not understand very well how it was working so I decided to take time to build my simple project on my own to have a better comprehension of what I was doing and how every small bricks interacts with each other, from transpiling to building, passing through coding React component in Typescript. I have a strong experience in Angular 2+ so I took a few ideas that I was confortable with and see how I could put it all together in a React project.

Recipe

Here is the list of my sweet ingredients to make it taste good to me:

• Webpack 4 because despite the fact that it's an evil machine, it's god damn powerful
• Typescript 3 because Ts is life
• Dotenv to handle configuration by environment
• SASS because I like it and I do what the fuck I want :)
• React because we can't escape from its hype...

Architecture

Below is how I role play the architect:

.
├── config      ===> webpack configuration
├── scripts     ===> global project scripts: translations generation, building script, ...
├── src         ===> project root container
│   ├── app     ===> here will be the container of the awesomness you will create
│   │   ├── components      ===> your sweet little components
│   │   └── index.tsx       ===> app entry point
│   ├── environments
│   ├── public              ===> public folder
│   │   ├── assets          ===> will contains the public assets like fonts, images, ...
│   │   ├── favicon.ico
│   │   └── index.html
│   └── styles              ===> global project styles, variables, mixins
│       ├── core
            ├── _mixins.scss
│       │   └── _variables.scss
│       └── style.scss
├── tsconfig.json

Preparation

In order to prepare this recipe in good conditions, you will first need to have some utensils, some good ones:

• Node v9 or later
• Yarn (Oooh god ! npm is so 2016...)

Cooking

Just yarn it

yarn install

Ready to eat !

To take away

To build it in order to deploy it, just run yarn build

Patterns

Styling

This project uses Sass because I find it powerful and it lets you have a nice architecture in your styles. In order to implement a viable and simple way of handling styles in the project, and above all avoid conflicts between my css rules I started to read a lot of very intersting stuff about CSS Modules, CSS-in-JS, pure or passing by styled-components or Radium and React Shadow. And I have to say that at the end, I was a little bit lost because almost every articles I read were saying that you can't handle every problematics with only one way, one library. I was frustrated because what I wanted is to have a very simple method to achieve it. Of course, I know that in big scalable projects, it can be useful to use these awesomes libraries but if you use this repo, I think you will add it by yourself. Every ways has its pros and cons. So I ended up with that very simple solution:

Add global style

• Create a .scss file, in the styles folder to add global styles, add mixins, variables and so on

Add component style

• Create a .scss file at the same level of your component (or anywhere else, it's up to you) and just surround your rules by a root rule to create a 'local scope' component styling:

.hello {
    ...
    h1 {
        ...
    }
    &:hover {
        ...
    }
}

Configuration

In order to configure your app, you will have 3 configuration files:

• .env at the project's root, which you won't find in the repo because it's an untracked file and a good practice is to keep it like this because it's in here that you will put your sensitive configuration
• src/app/environments/.env.#{currentEnvironment} will contains the configuration of the current environment e.g: .env.development
• src/app/environments/.env.local will override the others configuration files in the development mode ONLY

If you want to add a new environment file, just follow the same pattern combined with the proper command in the package.json

Extras

In the next days/weeks/months, I'm planning to add a postinstall script which would allows you to optionally add some extra stuff:

• [ ] React router
• [ ] StoryBook
• [ ] SSR
• [ ] Redux
• [ ] React Bootstrap
• [ ] React Material

Readings

After that, I recommend reading through the following articles:

• Piotr Witek’s React & Redux in TypeScript - Static Typing Guide
• Webpack Documentation

Discussion

If you try this repo, you might find some stuff you dislike and that's cool, we are all different, here is just a reflection of my vision now, maybe very naive but I'm an open minded guy so if you want to share some ideas, I will be glad to read it! To do so, I invit you to create a PR about whatever you want ;)

Licence

DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO PUBLIC LICENSE
                    Version 2, December 2004

 Copyright (C) 2004 Sam Hocevar <[email protected]>

 Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim or modified
 copies of this license document, and changing it is allowed as long
 as the name is changed.

            DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO PUBLIC LICENSE
   TERMS AND CONDITIONS FOR COPYING, DISTRIBUTION AND MODIFICATION

  0. You just DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO.