Minimal React Starter Kit

Intended to be as simple as small as possible for the advertised features:

Features:

React for UI Rendering
Falcor for Data Fetching
Express for Server Side Rendering
React Router
Webpack building ES6 with Babel 6
Hot Reloading

License

Licensed under the MIT License.

Install

Make sure you have NodeJS and npm installed

[https://nodejs.org/en/download/package-manager/](Install nodejs and npm)

Then install dependencies locally

npm install

Run build tool

For single build

./node_modules/.bin/webpack

Or in watch mode (for active development)

./node_modules/.bin/webpack -w

Or a production build, (in case you want to deploy)

./node_modules/.bin/webpack -p

You will find the results in the ./build/ folder (not pushed to git)

Make sure to keep watching the build window, in case there is a syntax error or something else preventing builds. Your code will not recompile if there are build errors

Run server

You need to re-run the server to isomorphically serve the latest version. However, if you are just changing frontend, you can choose to not restart the server on change, and the frontend code will still be up to date time. The isomorphism will be broken, but it's not important for development.

node build/server.js

Make sure you turn off browser caching. There's an option in Chrome dev tools to do this.

Isomorphism

This is served isomorphically. That means the initial render is on the server, then the identical code is served to the client, and the web browser client does subsequent renders. If you want to know more about what isomorphism is, here's an article that might help: