StarHackIt React Frontend

A functional Preact/React based frontend starter kit:

• preact or react for pure view layer, 100% stateless compoment.
• mobx for state management.
• glamorous for real-time styling.
• universal-router for the routing solution: code split, data fetching.
• Internationalization with i18next and react-intl
• Find bugs, enforce coding standards with eslint and its plugins: react, promise, mocha.
• Copy and paste detector with jscpd
• Display lint warnings and build errors to directly to the browser with webpack-hud
• Unit tests with karma, mocha and enzyme
• Code coverage with istanbul
• End to end tests with nightwatch
• Concatenation, minification, obfuscation and compression of javascript and css file
• Bundle size and dependencies size under control
• Logging with the debug library
• Configuration depending of the environment: dev, uat, prod etc ...

Development and build process

npm is used to define the 3rd party dependencies required by the frontend. npm comes with node so make sure there are already installed:

$ node -v
v5.6

$ npm -v
3.6

These are the main npm commands for a normal developer workflow:

| npm command | details | |----------------|----------| | npm install | Install dependencies | | npm start | Start a development web server | | npm test | Run the unit tests with Karma | | npm run test:watch | Watch the code and run the unit test | | npm run selenium-install | Intall the Selenium driver for end to end testing | | npm run e2e | Run the end to end tests with Nigthwatch/Selenium | | npm run build| Create a production build | | npm run start:prod| start a web server to serve the production build | | npm run bundle-size| Create a report to show the size of each dependencies | | npm run lint| Lint the source code | | npm run cpd| Run the copy and paste detector | | npm run clean| Clean the project |

Install

To download and install the dependencies set in package.json:

$ npm install

Build & Serve

Webpack has become the defacto standard for building React frontend, it is configured through 3 files:

• webpack.config.js: the configuration common to all environment.
• webpack.dev.js: the configuration for development environment. Thanks to the Webpack plugin OpenBrowserPlugin, a new browser page will be opened at the right URL i.e: http://localhost:8080
• webpack.prod.js: the configuration for production environment. The UglifyJsPlugin and the CompressionPlugin plugins are invoked to respectively remove code duplication, obfuscate and compress the code.

To run the development web server:

$ npm start

Hot reloading: Webpack detects any change in the code, it rebuilds automatically and pushes the new change the browser, no manual browser refresh required.

Test

Unit test with Karma

Unit tests are written as mocha test and executed thanks to karma:

$ npm test

End to end testing with nightwatch

To execute the end to end testing, a.k.a e2e testing, first make sure the frontend and backend are running, then run:

$ npm run selenium-install
$ npm run e2e

The end to end tests are executed by nightwatch which uses the Selenium driver API.

The test suite can be found in test/nightwatch

Configuration

The file src/app/config.js gathers the common configuration and the environment specific configuration which is selected by defining the variable NODE_ENV to production, development, uat etc ... The NODE_ENV variable is injected through the webpack plugin DefinePlugin.

Logging

The debug library is a convenient way to log messages with prefix. Messages can be switch on and off depending on the prefix, see src/app/app.js

CORS

To avoid CORS issues, the webpack development server is configured to act as a proxy server, requests beginning with /api/v1/ are forwarded to the api server located at http://localhost:9000. See the gulp task webpack-dev-server in gulpfile.js

Internationalization

The i18next provides internationalization support for this project. Translations are retrieved at run time without bloating the application with all translations.

Here are the i18next plugins configured in src/app/utils/i18n.js:

• i18next-browser-languagedetector: language detector used in browser environment for i18next
• i18next-localstorage-cache: caching layer for i18next using browsers localStorage
• i18next-xhr-backend: backend layer for i18next using browsers xhr

The translation files are located in locales directory.

Production build

To build the production version:

$ npm run build

webpack will produce a report with all the assets and their respective size.

Version: webpack 3.3.0
Time: 17286ms
                             Asset       Size  Chunks                    Chunk Names
      2.f09209ebd25efb13e2d0.js.gz    9.98 kB          [emitted]         
         0.f09209ebd25efb13e2d0.js     142 kB       0  [emitted]         
         2.f09209ebd25efb13e2d0.js    45.9 kB       2  [emitted]         
         3.f09209ebd25efb13e2d0.js     298 kB    3, 5  [emitted]  [big]  
         4.f09209ebd25efb13e2d0.js    5.21 kB       4  [emitted]         
         5.f09209ebd25efb13e2d0.js    6.26 kB       5  [emitted]         
         6.f09209ebd25efb13e2d0.js    5.62 kB       6  [emitted]         
         7.f09209ebd25efb13e2d0.js    5.09 kB       7  [emitted]         
         8.f09209ebd25efb13e2d0.js    65.2 kB       8  [emitted]         
         9.f09209ebd25efb13e2d0.js    2.29 kB       9  [emitted]         
       app.f09209ebd25efb13e2d0.js     350 kB      10  [emitted]  [big]  app
     0.f09209ebd25efb13e2d0.js.map     727 kB       0  [emitted]         
     1.f09209ebd25efb13e2d0.js.map     479 kB       1  [emitted]         
     2.f09209ebd25efb13e2d0.js.map     312 kB       2  [emitted]         
     3.f09209ebd25efb13e2d0.js.map     649 kB    3, 5  [emitted]         
     4.f09209ebd25efb13e2d0.js.map      43 kB       4  [emitted]         
     5.f09209ebd25efb13e2d0.js.map    32.1 kB       5  [emitted]         
     6.f09209ebd25efb13e2d0.js.map    26.5 kB       6  [emitted]         
     7.f09209ebd25efb13e2d0.js.map    23.9 kB       7  [emitted]         
     8.f09209ebd25efb13e2d0.js.map     470 kB       8  [emitted]         
     9.f09209ebd25efb13e2d0.js.map    10.8 kB       9  [emitted]         
   app.f09209ebd25efb13e2d0.js.map    2.21 MB      10  [emitted]         app
         1.f09209ebd25efb13e2d0.js    77.5 kB       1  [emitted]         
  4.f09209ebd25efb13e2d0.js.map.gz    7.82 kB          [emitted]         
  5.f09209ebd25efb13e2d0.js.map.gz    5.02 kB          [emitted]         
  6.f09209ebd25efb13e2d0.js.map.gz    6.01 kB          [emitted]         
  7.f09209ebd25efb13e2d0.js.map.gz     5.5 kB          [emitted]         
  9.f09209ebd25efb13e2d0.js.map.gz    2.68 kB          [emitted]         
      1.f09209ebd25efb13e2d0.js.gz    16.8 kB          [emitted]         
      8.f09209ebd25efb13e2d0.js.gz    18.1 kB          [emitted]         
      0.f09209ebd25efb13e2d0.js.gz    29.7 kB          [emitted]         
  2.f09209ebd25efb13e2d0.js.map.gz    58.4 kB          [emitted]         
    app.f09209ebd25efb13e2d0.js.gz    96.9 kB          [emitted]         
  1.f09209ebd25efb13e2d0.js.map.gz      93 kB          [emitted]         
      3.f09209ebd25efb13e2d0.js.gz     178 kB          [emitted]         
  8.f09209ebd25efb13e2d0.js.map.gz     105 kB          [emitted]         
  3.f09209ebd25efb13e2d0.js.map.gz     364 kB          [emitted]  [big]  
  0.f09209ebd25efb13e2d0.js.map.gz     151 kB          [emitted]         
app.f09209ebd25efb13e2d0.js.map.gz     532 kB          [emitted]  [big]  
                        index.html    3.01 kB          [emitted]         

To find out exactly the weight of each individual library, the tool webpack-bundle-size-analyzer creates a report displaying the size and the relative percentage of the dependencies.