RENCI React Starter

This React application boilerplate contains an initial configuration common to the many of the web applications built at/by/for RENCI.

The following are set up by default: Webpack 5, Babel, CSS Modules, Source Maps, Hot Module Replacement, React, Image support (png, jpg, jpeg, gif, svg, webp), and ESLint. Basic client-side routing is configured with a couple exmaples using Markdown files for content management. For a more complete set of dependencies, consult the package.json file. In addition, this starter comes with the branding resources for RENCI and UNC, which we also often require.

🚀 Get Started

This repository is a template repository. Click Use this template to generate a new repository with the same directory structure and files as this repository. (The "Include all branches" checkbox can safely remain unchecked on the repository generation page.)

🚧 Application Development

Now that we have the base code. We're ready to install the application depdendencies and begin development. Move into the project root directory, and install the dependencies with npm i. Then start a local development server by running npm start. Note that this development environment utilizes hot-module-replacement and react-refresh for optimal developer experience. That's it!

Environment Variables

Not every UI will require environment-specific variables, but it is common, so some notes are here to get that set up in Webpack. First, we'll need to install dotenv-webpack, which compiles environment variables into the application bundle.

npm i dotenv-webpack -D

Next, we'll make two additions to webpack.config.js: (1) import this new dependency at the top of the file

const DotenvPlugin = require('dotenv-webpack')

and (2) add the plugin to the plugins array.

const plugins = [
  // ...
  new DotenvPlugin(),
]

All done! Now, Webpack will look for the .env file for environment variables to feed into the application. A typical .env file might look something like the following.

# .env
API_PORT=3000

The environment variables defined in the .env file will populate the process.env object in your React application. See the dotenv-webpack documentation for additional customization. Note that it is often desirable to add .env to your .gitignore file.

This section can be used as a guide to install other Webpack plugins and loaders in general.

🎁 Building for Production

To build a production-ready React app, run npm run build from the project root directory. The bundled files will be exported to the dist directory. To build an easily debuggable production build, use npm run build-dev.

Docker

A Dockerfile lives in this repo to help get started with containerized deployment. It is a multi-stage build that results in an NGINX image with the application bundle where NGNIX expects to find it.

The command to build an image might look something like the following.

docker build -t my-ui .

To spin up a container from your image, use a command such as the following.