REACT + WEBPACK MODERN BOILERPLATE

This repository contains a simple but complete boilerplate, with sass compiler and hot-reloading, to easily and fastly start developing projects from scratch with React 16 and Webpack 4

This project was born mainly to satisfy my desire for knowledge.
Being a curious developer I have always wondered how the "engine" of boilerplate generators worked (especially the famous create-react-app) and I realized that the only way to really learn what's "under the hood" is to write a custom tool to retrace step by step all the main features (plus it was a great way to deepen updates released by Webpack 4).

This project is developed following the best practice for React and style (using OOCSS, ITCSS and BEM methodologies)

---

What this boilerplate contains

                          

Features

• React 16.4.2
• Webpack 4
• Babel (ES6 and JSX support)
• Sass compiler
• Handlebar compiler
• Html, Js, Css minifier
• Development / Production environment ready
• Style linter
• Airbnb javascript linter
• Style and script hot reloading in development mode
• Caching system for production environment
• Pwa integrated system (Google Workbox)
• Routing environment with React-router
• Test environment with Enzyme and Jest

---

Set up project

Before cloning the repo be sure you have installed:

• Node (version >= 9.10.x), please install NVM and run nvm use to have the right node version for the project
• Yarn (version >= 1.9.x)
• Npm (version >= 6.2.x)
• Nvm (version >= 0.33.x)

Then:

• Choose a folder project in your system and switch in cd [folder path]
• Clone the repo in your folder git clone https://github.com/ibbatta/webpack-modern-boilerplate.git

---

Installation

To install the project and all dependencies, enter in the project folder and run:

# install dependencies
npm install

or

# install dependencies
yarn

---

Run the project

Run the project to develop:

Run the project locally using webpack-dev-server on port 9000 (as default)

npm start:dev
# or
yarn start:dev

Run the project to production:

npm start
#or
yarn start

You can change the default port value setting PORT in the node env
i.e. PORT=8080 npm start:dev or PORT=8080 yarn start:dev

Run the analyzer for webpack:

npm analyze
#or
yarn analyze

Run the tests:

npm test
#or
yarn test

You can add the --watch flag if you want keep watching changes for test files.

---

What is ITCSS?

ITCSS stands for Inverted Triangle CSS and it helps you to organize your project CSS files in such way that you can better deal with (not always easy-to-deal with) CSS specifics like global namespace, cascade and selectors specificity.

ITCSS can be used with preprocessors or without them and is compatible with CSS methodologies like BEM, SMACSS or OOCSS.

One of the key principles of ITCSS is that it separates your CSS codebase to several sections (called layers), which take form of the inverted triangle:

• Settings: used with preprocessors and contain font, colors definitions, etc.
• Tools: globally used mixins and functions. It’s important not to output any CSS in the first 2 layers.
• Generic: reset and/or normalize styles, box-sizing definition, etc. This is the first layer which generates actual CSS.
• Elements: styling for bare HTML elements (like H1, A, etc.). These come with default styling from the browser so we can redefine them here.
• Objects: class-based selectors which define undecorated design patterns, for example media object known from OOCSS.
• Components: specific UI components. This is where majority of our work takes place and our UI components are often composed of Objects and Components.
• Utilities: utilities and helper classes with ability to override anything which goes before in the triangle, e.g. hide helper class.

You will find a more complete explanation inside each ITCSS layer in ./app folder.

---

Editor setup

To keep consistency to the style of resources, I decided to stick to some shared rules that have to be applied to every project using some editors plugins. Please be sure to disable / remove any other js/jsx linters or custom configurations.

Basic Editor Configuration

I chose to use EditorConfig to share the basic configuration like indentation and charset. It works including an .editorconfig file in the root directory and making sure your editor has the necessary plugin. You can find a list of downloads here. The choice to keep the indentation with 2 spaces is to be compliant with actual standards (major frameworks use this configuration both for JS and CSS).

Auto correction on save

I have chose to use js-beautify. Despite of his name it works as a beautifier also for HTML and CSS. Every editor has a plugin that implement it, es. Sublime, Atom or Visual studio. The setup for js-beautify is controlled within a .jsbeautifyrc file that have to be included in the root directory of the project (.hbs are not completely supported yet).

Eslint

To check on Javascript / React [.js / .jsx] syntax I use Eslint. The rules to detect errors are written in a .eslintrc file included in the root directory of the project (for best practices use airbnb linter).

---

Todo

• Update React version
• Migrate to Terser for js minification
• Node + Express server
• Introduce Redux
• Define a custom styleguide

---

Contributing

• Fork it!
• Create your feature branch: git checkout -b my-new-feature
• Commit your changes: git commit -am 'Add some feature'
• Push to the branch: git push origin my-new-feature
• Submit a pull request

---

Credits

• Lubos Kmetko (kudos for the great ITCSS guide)

---

Troubleshootings

This is just a personal project created for study / demonstration purpose only, it may or may not be a good fit for your project(s).

---

GitHub @ibbatta  ·  Twitter @battago