react-notifications-hook

Easily create your own notification system in your React app without having to buy into prescribed styling or templating.

Why?

• No styling included
• Uses React hooks and context
• Typescript support
• Custom notification properties
• Mock and test notifications in your app
• Easily animate notifications using Framer Motion.

What it looks like

function MyComponent() {
  const notifications = useNotifications();

  function notify() {
    notifications.add('example', {
      title: 'Hello world',
    });
  }

  return <div onClick={notify}>Show notification</div>;
}

Usage

You'll start by using the createNotificationContext function to create the React context, hooks, and helpers.

First create a type for your notifications. Unlike other libraries there is no specific list of fields that need to exist.

interface Notification {
  message: string;
  duration: number;
  level: 'success' | 'error'
}

Then you need to create the React context and hooks, passing in the Notification type. This will give you type-safety.

const { NotificationProvider } = createNotificationProvider<Notification>();

Now you'll need to create a component that renders your notifications:

const { NotificationProvider } = createNotificationProvider<Notification>();

function NotificationListProvider(props: Props) {
  const { children } = props;

  return (
    <NotificationProvider>
      {
        (notifications) => (
          <div>
            {children}
            <div>
              {notifications.map(({ data }) => (
                <div>{data.message}</div>
              ))}
            </div>
          </div>
        )
      }
    <NotificationProvider>
  );
}

Now you'll need to render it at the top of your app. If you're using Next.js this would mean in pages/_app.tsx. You want to do this so that the NotificationProvider wraps any component that intends to create notifications, as it lets you use the useNotifications hook.

Now let's add animation to our notifications using Framer motion:

import { motion, AnimatePresence } from 'framer-motion';

Then we'll wrap our notifications list:

function NotificationListProvider(props: Props) {
  const { children } = props;

  return (
    <NotificationProvider>
      {
        (notifications) => (
          <div>
            {children}
            <AnimatePresence>
              {notifications.map(({ id, data }) => (
                <motion.div
                  key={id}
                  positionTransition
                  initial={{ opacity: 0, y: 50, scale: 0.3 }}
                  animate={{ opacity: 1, y: 0, scale: 1 }}
                  exit={{ opacity: 0, scale: 0.5, transition: { duration: 0.2 } }}
                >
                  {data.title}
                </motion.div>
              ))}
            </AnimatePresence>
          </div>
        )
      }
    <NotificationProvider>
  );
}

To access the notifications API from your components you'll need to export the useNotifications hook that is created for you:

const { NotificationProvider, useNotifications } = createNotificationProvider<Notification>();

Then export it alongside NotificationListProvider:

export { NotificationListProvider, useNotifications };

Now in your components you can use the hook:

import { useNotification } from 'lib/notifications-provider';

function MyComponent() {
  const notifications = useNotifications();

  function notify() {
    notifications.add('example', {
      title: 'Hello world',
    });
  }

  return <div onClick={notify}>Show notification</div>;
}

Development

Commands

TSDX scaffolds your new library inside /src, and also sets up a Parcel-based playground for it inside /example.

The recommended workflow is to run TSDX in one terminal:

npm start # or yarn start

This builds to /dist and runs the project in watch mode so any edits you save inside src causes a rebuild to /dist.

Then run the example inside another:

cd example
npm i # or yarn to install dependencies
npm start # or yarn start

The default example imports and live reloads whatever is in /dist, so if you are seeing an out of date component, make sure TSDX is running in watch mode like we recommend above. No symlinking required, we use Parcel's aliasing.

To do a one-off build, use npm run build or yarn build.

To run tests, use npm test or yarn test.

Configuration

Code quality is set up for you with prettier, husky, and lint-staged. Adjust the respective fields in package.json accordingly.

Jest

Jest tests are set up to run with npm test or yarn test. This runs the test watcher (Jest) in an interactive mode. By default, runs tests related to files changed since the last commit.

Setup Files

This is the folder structure we set up for you:

/example
  index.html
  index.tsx       # test your component here in a demo app
  package.json
  tsconfig.json
/src
  index.tsx       # EDIT THIS
/test
  blah.test.tsx   # EDIT THIS
.gitignore
package.json
README.md         # EDIT THIS
tsconfig.json

React Testing Library

We do not set up react-testing-library for you yet, we welcome contributions and documentation on this.

Rollup

TSDX uses Rollup v1.x as a bundler and generates multiple rollup configs for various module formats and build settings. See Optimizations for details.

TypeScript

tsconfig.json is set up to interpret dom and esnext types, as well as react for jsx. Adjust according to your needs.

Continuous Integration

Travis

to be completed

Circle

to be completed

Optimizations

Please see the main tsdx optimizations docs. In particular, know that you can take advantage of development-only optimizations:

// ./types/index.d.ts
declare var __DEV__: boolean;

// inside your code...
if (__DEV__) {
  console.log('foo');
}

You can also choose to install and use invariant and warning functions.

Module Formats

CJS, ESModules, and UMD module formats are supported.

The appropriate paths are configured in package.json and dist/index.js accordingly. Please report if any issues are found.

Using the Playground

cd example
npm i # or yarn to install dependencies
npm start # or yarn start

The default example imports and live reloads whatever is in /dist, so if you are seeing an out of date component, make sure TSDX is running in watch mode like we recommend above. No symlinking required!

Deploying the Playground

The Playground is just a simple Parcel app, you can deploy it anywhere you would normally deploy that. Here are some guidelines for manually deploying with the Netlify CLI (npm i -g netlify-cli):

cd example # if not already in the example folder
npm run build # builds to dist
netlify deploy # deploy the dist folder

Alternatively, if you already have a git repo connected, you can set up continuous deployment with Netlify:

netlify init
# build command: yarn build && cd example && yarn && yarn build
# directory to deploy: example/dist
# pick yes for netlify.toml

Named Exports

Per Palmer Group guidelines, always use named exports. Code split inside your React app instead of your React library.

Including Styles

There are many ways to ship styles, including with CSS-in-JS. TSDX has no opinion on this, configure how you like.

For vanilla CSS, you can include it at the root directory and add it to the files section in your package.json, so that it can be imported separately by your users and run through their bundler's loader.

Publishing to NPM

We recommend using np.

Usage with Lerna

When creating a new package with TSDX within a project set up with Lerna, you might encounter a Cannot resolve dependency error when trying to run the example project. To fix that you will need to make changes to the package.json file inside the example directory.

The problem is that due to the nature of how dependencies are installed in Lerna projects, the aliases in the example project's package.json might not point to the right place, as those dependencies might have been installed in the root of your Lerna project.

Change the alias to point to where those packages are actually installed. This depends on the directory structure of your Lerna project, so the actual path might be different from the diff below.

   "alias": {
-    "react": "../node_modules/react",
-    "react-dom": "../node_modules/react-dom"
+    "react": "../../../node_modules/react",
+    "react-dom": "../../../node_modules/react-dom"
   },

An alternative to fixing this problem would be to remove aliases altogether and define the dependencies referenced as aliases as dev dependencies instead. However, that might cause other problems.