/react-starter-project

Primary LanguageJavaScript

ReactJs Starter Kit 👨🏼‍💻

Basic starter kit to create an App using create-react-app and most of the best packges or tools for dates, fetching, tests, coverage, linting, formatting and more.

🔖 Table of Contents

🚀 Getting Started

For a long time I researched a good starter point to learn or to start a project with ReactJS and basic plugins, best practices, conventions, file structure, and more, I found different pieces of what I was looking for so I decided to put them all together.

So basically, what you have here is a reactjs starter project created with create-react-app and essential configurations to start a clean and fast ReactJS App:

  • Routing (ReactJs Router).
  • Store Management (Redux / Modules).
  • Unit testing (jest/enzyme).
  • Coverage tests.
  • Lint and formatting (ESLint + Airbnb + Prettier).
  • Date-fns (datetime library - functional approach https://date-fns.org/).
  • Solid and recommended file structure (supports containers, dumb and smart components).
  • Configuration files.
  • Custom scripts.
  • Examples for CSS Modules, SaSS or Styled Components.

So feel free to fork and enjoy it 😃.

Run npm install and then npm start.

🤔 Prerequisites

NodeJS https://nodejs.org/en/

👨🏼‍💻 VS Code Plugins

My favorite IDE is VS Code so I included a list of basic plugins for ReactJS apps (if you use a different IDE I'm pretty sure there should be the same plugins for your IDE):

Must

  • ES7 React/Redux
  • Jest
  • ESLint
  • Prettier
  • EditorConfig for VS Code
  • DotENV

Optionals

  • Auto Close Tag
  • Auto Rename Tag
  • Auto import - ES6
  • Path Intellisense
  • TODO Highlight
  • vscode-styled-components
  • Sass

🙌 Available Scripts

In the project directory, you can run:

npm start

Runs the app in the development mode.
Open http://localhost:3000 to view it in the browser.

The page will reload if you make edits.
You will also see any lint errors in the console.

npm test

Launches the test runner in the interactive watch mode.

npm run build

Builds the app for production to the build folder.
It correctly bundles React in production mode and optimizes the build for the best performance.

The build is minified and the filenames include the hashes.
Your app is ready to be deployed!

npm run eject

Note: this is a one-way operation. Once you eject, you can’t go back!

If you aren’t satisfied with the build tool and configuration choices, you can eject at any time. This command will remove the single build dependency from your project.

Instead, it will copy all the configuration files and the transitive dependencies (Webpack, Babel, ESLint, etc) right into your project so you have full control over them. All of the commands except eject will still work, but they will point to the copied scripts so you can tweak them. At this point you’re on your own.

You don’t have to ever use eject. The curated feature set is suitable for small and middle deployments, and you shouldn’t feel obligated to use this feature. However we understand that this tool wouldn’t be useful if you couldn’t customize it when you are ready for it.

npm run build fails to minify

https://facebook.github.io/create-react-app/docs/troubleshooting#npm-run-build-fails-to-minify

npm run lint

Lints all the files inside ./src and shows the result without fixing.

😎 File Structure

Folder structure is based on productivity and some personal preferences:

src
├── App.css                 * Main app styles.
├── App.jsx                 * Main app component.
├── api                     * Abstractions for making API requests
├── assets                  * Assets that are imported into your components(images, custom svg, etc).
│   └── ...
├── components              * Components of the projects that are not the main views.
│   └── ui                  * Generic and reusable across the whole app. Presentational components eg. Buttons, Inputs, Checkboxes.
│   └── layout              * Unique and one time use components that will help with app structure.
│   └── <domain component>  * Belong to a specific domain. Reusable in different pages.
│   └── ...
├── plugins                 * Init and config plugins(moment, material-ui, adal, etc).
│   └── ...
├── index.jsx               * Entry point of the application.
├── services                * All the common services. e.g. Authentication, hubs, etc.
├── store                   * The Redux action types in action-type.js, reducers, selectors and main store in the sub-folders.
│   ├── index.js
│   └── middlewares         * Store middlewares.
│   └── sagas               * Saga files in case of redux-saga.
│   └── modules             * Store modules/ducks structure.
│       └── smallModule.js  * Small modules can contain actions, action types, reducers and selectors in the same file.
│       └── bigModule       * Big modules should be composed by separated files for actions, action types, reducer and selectors.
│           └── index.js
│           └── actions.js
│           └── ...
├── styles/theme            * All common styles (css) or theme (sass, styled-components).
├── utils                   * Functions (for tests, for regex value testing, constants or filters.)
│   └── ...
├── pages                   * Routed components that represents pages(Presentational Components Only).
│   └── ...
└── .vscode                 * VS Code workspace settings to work with ESLint rules and formatting
                              (you can also lint or fix on save 😉).

Some important root files

.
├── .editorconfig           * Coding styles (also by programming language).
├── .env                    * Environment variables (env.production, env.local, env.uat, etc).
├── .eslintrc.json          * ESLint configuration and rules.
├── .prettierrc             * Formatting Prettier options.
└── jsconfig.json           * JS compiler configurations (eg. set the root folder for roots when import files).

Conventions

Here are a few important conventions:

JSX vs JS

Since JSX is not standard JS so it should go into it's own extension ie. .ts for TypeScript, .jsx for JSX. Now days, most of the IDE's support both extensions for ReactJs, so more important reason today is that helps to indicate what it is: a component or plain js?.

Naming

  • Component names should always be multi-word, except for root App components. Use UserCard or ProfileCard instead of Card for example. Each component should be in its own file.

    Gives more meaning and context of what the component does.

  • Components files should be always PascalCase/kebab-case except for HOC's. Use UserCard.jsx or user-card.jsx.

    PascalCase works best with autocompletion in code editors, as it’s consistent with how we reference
components in JS(X) and templates, wherever possible.

However, mixed case filenames can sometimes create issues on case-insensitive file systems, which
is why kebab-case is also perfectly acceptable.

  • Components are named accordingly to it's relative path to components or src. Given that, a component located at src/components/User/List.jsx would be named as UserList. A component located at src/screens/User/List would be named as ScreensUserList.

  • Components that are in a folder with same name, don’t repeat the name in the component. Considering that, a component located at src/components/User/List/List.jsx would be named as UserList and NOT as UserListList.

    The name we give to the components, should be clear and unique in the application, in order to
make them being easier to find and to avoid possible confusions.

Easy search inside the project.

  • Components that are only used once per page should begin with the prefix “The”, to denote that there can be only one. For example for a navbar or a footer you should use TheNavbar.jsx or TheFooter.jsx.

    This does not mean the component is only used in a single page,
but it will only be used once per page.

These components never accept any props, since they are specific to your app, not their context
within your app.

If you find the need to add props, it’s a good indication that this is actually a reusable
component that is only used once per page for now.

  • High Order Components (HOC) file and folder name in lowerCamelCase.

    Generic convention

  • Always use full name instead of abbreviation in the name of your components. For example don’t use UDSettings, use instead UserDashboardSettings.

    Keep things clear

  • Each page is a react class component having some state. A page component uses other components to assemble the page like lego blocks.

    Single entry point by feature or page.

Keep the pages in a separated folder in the root of src, because they will be
grouped accordingly to the route definition and not by modules.

  • Keep components shallow. If a components has a lot of nested markup then the chances of reusing it decreases. Instead we should take advantage of composition. It saves us from prop drilling or having to reach out to context api.

    Reusable and Readable code.

Passing down props to multiple child components is what they call a code smell.

  • Presentational components are those who don’t have internal state. Their role is to show certain pieces of UI or Layout. They are provided data via props or context api or state management.

  • Container components are those which deals with business logic. They usually have some state and only render presentational components based on the logic.

    This way Presentational and Container components complete the puzzle together.

By dividing the responsibilities, code becomes easier to maintain and debug.

Organization / Best practices

  • Use a central export file (Barrel export -> index.js) in the components directory. With this file we can just import all of our components into it and export them. This will allow us to import components into any file from the same place.
  • Presentational and Container components are kept at src/components.
  • Group components by module/feature inside components folder.
  • Keep generic components by context inside src/components/ui or src/components/layout.
  • Keep pages simple, with minimum structure and code.
  • Group pages accordingly to route definition. For a route /user/list we would have a page located at /src/pages/User/List.jsx.

🗒 Resources

I got inspired by: