Welcome to this brave new world. This is a world of the future that also brings with us all of the things we learned in the past.
It may be a bit overwhelming if you try to understand all of it right out of the gate, though. This is a many layered architecture that sets you up for success at every level. It is highly opinionated, but attempts to hold these opinions loosely so that you can change it if you so desire.
npm install
npm start
open localhost:4000
git clone https://github.com/Skookum/generator-genreact.git
cd generator-genreact
npm link
Components are the building blocks of your application. Think of them like Web Component, but better. They have clear compositional boundaries, care their CSS and behavior with them, and your application understands these dependencies so bundling for production is trivial.
Examples:
yo Genreact:component MyComponentName
This will generate the following file structure in ./app/components
.
|- MyComponentname/
|- index.js
|- styles.css
|- __test__/
|- index.js
Handlers are almost synonymous with a route or URL. Think of these as the entry point to a specific part of your application.
Examples:
yo Genreact:handler MyPageHandler
yo Genreact:handler MyPageHandler/MySectionHandler
The key difference is whether it’s a top-level route or a child route. This command will create the following structure and attempt to add it to the appropriate location in your `routes.js file.
You’ve generated a few components and now you have a few pages. We’ve already seen the structure that a component generates and requires. To generate additional, section-specific components, you would do the following:
Examples:
yo Genreact:component MyFlashyComponent
-->./app/components/MyFlashComponent
yo Genreact:component MyPageHandler/MyFlashyComponent
-->./app/MyPageHandler/components/MyFlashComponent
yo Genreact:component MyPageHandler/MySectionHandler/MyFlashyComponent
-->./app/MyPageHandler/MySectionHandler/components/MyFlashComponent
Pablo Picaso said that great artists steal. Whilst not a copy-paste deal (plagiarism), this toolchain takes the best practices and experiences we’ve had creating great consumer products and bundles it together for us in a package that allows us to not just get up and running quickly, but to iterate effectively.
A few of the things that you will find in here:
- An amazing development environment. There is hot-reload tooling for both the client and server built-in.
- A component architecture with colocated concerns.
- Test suites that are ready to go.
- A UI toolchain. We expect and prefer that you’re data layer be somewhere else. The data and UI layers should be able to scale independently as needed.
- SuitCSS conformance checking. CSS in and of itself includes many foot-guns. Suit will keep the safety on. (We will likely be exploring other more restrictive options in the future)
- Rich documentation and style guide web interface.
Ideally, in this environment you should have less to think about while writing a component. You don’t need to worry about how compilation happens or how to ensure that the CSS a component needs gets onto a page. You shouldn’t need to worry about how the final files are delivered to a client in production. These are all practices that are understood well, but full of nuance and tradeoffs. We have tuned—and continue to tune—these characteristics.
- Webpack
- React
- react-router
- react-resolver
- jest
This generator and toolchain is MIT Licensed. The projects and tools we bring together for you each have their own license and terms you should be aware of.