An opinionated React/Redux + Spring Boot Starter App
Be more productive with this simple project that uses the spring dev tools and react transform for hot reloading.
Everything: backend, frontend and styles will be hot reloaded automatically.
This project also sets up spring security and spring-sessions, which will automatically store your sessions in Redis, allowing you to scale on multiple servers.
Both the frontend and the backend are fully tested.
Developing
The Java code is available in the backend sub-project.
The frontend sub-project contains the javascript code.
Running the backend (recommended)
The recommended way to launch the server is to use your favorite java IDE.
The main method of the application is in the BootReactApplication class.
Running the frontend (recommended)
You will need node 6.0+ and yarn to run the dev server and build the project
The frontend dev server will be automatically launched when you start the backend.
I strongly recommend that you install yarn on your development machine.
To install download the dependencies needed by the frontend do:
cd frontend
yarn
If you do not have the required binaries on your machine, you can use ./gradlew frontend:yarn_install and ./gradlew frontend:start.
Those two command will download the required node/yarn versions automatically and use them to run the node tasks.
Alternatives for running the projects
There is also a gradle task to run the spring server: ./gradlew bootRun.
Hot reloading
With the dev server running, saving your javascript files or stylus assets will automatically trigger the hot reloading (without browser refresh) of the application.
For the backend, recompiling the project in your IDE will trigger the reloading of the application's class loader.
Sessions
Sessions are stored in Redis with spring-sessions. Spring-sessions allows you to transparently persist the HttpSession on Redis. This allows to distribute the load on multiple servers if you choose to.
The application relies on a stateless REST api.
When they authenticate, clients will be given a token.
They will save this token in their local storage and send it as an HTTP header (x-auth-token).
This allows the retrieval of the session data in Redis.
If you want to use a real redis, you can run the application with the redis profile.
If the redis profile is not active, your session will be stored in a map.
See: EmbeddedSessionConfig.
This is great in development but you should avoid it in production.
Active profiles
If your run your project with gradle, the system properties won't be passed on to Spring. See this issue for workarounds.
The simplest way to go is to specify active profiles in your IDE.
Check out the doc to learn more about profiles in Spring Boot.
To run the jar in production mode use the following command:
java -jar boot-react-0.0.1-SNAPSHOT.jar --spring.profiles.active=production 16:57:01
Security
The application is configured to work with Spring Security. It uses an in-memory authentication but you are free use other implementations or to roll your own.
Redux
This project uses Redux to handle state and actions. It is a simple library with very powerful dev tools.
Dan Abramov, the author of Redux, published a great Redux video tutorial.
I also suggest reading the redux quick start to understand how to architecture you application and the difference between containers and components.
Components are simple display elements that receive everything they need (state and actions) via props.
Containers are connected to Redux and as such, they can pull whatever properties they are interested in from the state and bind actions to dispatch. Those containers are only connecting simple components to Redux.
We can write tests on connected components, but it is more effective to test them in isolation from Redux.
Router push state
The project uses react-router to handle routes. You can choose several modes to handles the router history. By default, the project uses the browser history, which creates the nicest URLs (/login, /private, etc.).
In development, we use a dev server that proxies requests to the index.
In production, we have to use a special resource handler to redirect all non-asset requests to the index.
You can remove it if you choose to use memory history (no URL change) or hash history (/#/login, /#/private).
Running the tests
The check tasks will run the tests in both the frontend and the backend:
./gradlew check
You can run the backend/frontend tests only with:
./gradlew backend/frontend:test
To test the backend, we use a simple library that wraps spring mvc tests and makes them a bit nicer to read. See the auth-spec for an example.
To test the frontend, we use enzyme.
Shipping
This command will generate an optimized bundle and include it in the jar.
./gradlew clean assemble
The jar will be available in ./backend/build/libs/boot-react-0.0.1-SNAPSHOT.jar
You can then launch it with:
java -jar -Dspring.profiles.active=production backend/build/libs/boot-react-0.0.1-SNAPSHOT.jar
In production, you should use a real Redis instance so, please uncomment and edit the configuration file
(backend/src/main/resources/application.yml).
With spring boot 1.3, you can install the application as a linux service
NB: each application can be assembled with the assemble task so you can use frontend:assemble or backend:assemble.
The backend task depends on the frontend task.