/patternfly-react-seed

A PatternFly seed for React web applications

Primary LanguageTypeScriptMIT LicenseMIT

Patternfly Seed

Patternfly Seed is an open source build scaffolding utility for web apps. The primary purpose of this project is to give developers a jump start when creating new projects that will use patternfly. A secondary purpose of this project is to serve as a reference for how to configure various aspects of an application that uses patternfly, webpack, react, typescript, etc.

Out of the box you'll get an app layout with chrome (header/sidebar), routing, build pipeline, test suite, and some code quality tools. Basically, all the essentials.

Out of box dashboard view of patternfly seed

Quick-start

git clone https://github.com/patternfly/patternfly-react-seed
cd patternfly-react-seed
npm install && npm run start:dev

Development scripts

# Install development/build dependencies
npm install

# Start the development server
npm run start:dev

# Run a production build (outputs to "dist" dir)
npm run build

# Run the test suite
npm run test

# Run the test suite with coverage
npm run test:coverage

# Run the linter
npm run lint

# Run the code formatter
npm run format

# Launch a tool to inspect the bundle size
npm run bundle-profile:analyze

# Start the express server (run a production build first)
npm run start

Configurations

Raster image support

To use an image asset that's shipped with PatternFly core, you'll prefix the paths with "@assets". @assets is an alias for the PatternFly assets directory in node_modules.

For example:

import imgSrc from '@assets/images/g_sizing.png';
<img src={imgSrc} alt="Some image" />

You can use a similar technique to import assets from your local app, just prefix the paths with "@app". @app is an alias for the main src/app directory.

import loader from '@app/assets/images/loader.gif';
<img src={loader} alt="Content loading" />

Vector image support

Inlining SVG in the app's markup is also possible.

import logo from '@app/assets/images/logo.svg';
<span dangerouslySetInnerHTML={{__html: logo}} />

You can also use SVG when applying background images with CSS. To do this, your SVG's must live under a bgimages directory (this directory name is configurable in webpack.common.js). This is necessary because you may need to use SVG's in several other context (inline images, fonts, icons, etc.) and so we need to be able to differentiate between these usages so the appropriate loader is invoked.

body {
  background: url(./assets/bgimages/img_avatar.svg);
}

Adding custom CSS

When importing CSS from a third-party package for the first time, you may encounter the error Module parse failed: Unexpected token... You may need an appropriate loader to handle this file typ.... You need to register the path to the stylesheet directory in stylePaths.js. We specify these explicitly for performance reasons to avoid webpack needing to crawl through the entire node_modules directory when parsing CSS modules.

Code quality tools

  • For accessibility compliance, we use react-axe
  • To keep our bundle size in check, we use webpack-bundle-analyzer
  • To keep our code formatting in check, we use prettier
  • To keep our code logic and test coverage in check, we use jest
  • To ensure code styles remain consistent, we use eslint

Multi environment configuration

This project uses dotenv-webpack for exposing environment variables to your code. Either export them at the system level like export MY_ENV_VAR=http://dev.myendpoint.com && npm run start:dev or simply drop a .env file in the root that contains your key-value pairs like below:

ENV_1=http://1.myendpoint.com
ENV_2=http://2.myendpoint.com

With that in place, you can use the values in your code like console.log(process.env.ENV_1);