React Redux Starter Kit

Starter kit to get you up and running with a bunch of awesome new front-end technologies, all on top of a configurable, feature-rich webpack build system that's already setup to provide hot reloading, sass imports with CSS extraction, unit testing, code coverage reports, bundle splitting, and a whole lot more. Check out the full feature list below!

Redux, React-Router, and React are constantly releasing new API changes. If you'd like to help keep this boilerplate up to date, please contribute or create a new issue if you think this starter kit is missing something!

Table of Contents

1. Requirements
2. Features
3. Getting Started
4. Usage
5. Structure
6. Webpack
7. Styles
8. Testing
9. Utilities
10. Troubleshooting

Requirements

Node ^4.0.0 or ^5.0.0 (npm3 recommended).

Features

• React (^0.14.0)
  • Includes react-addons-test-utils (^0.14.0)
• React-Router (^1.0.0)
• Redux (^3.0.0)
  • redux-router (^1.0.0-beta3)
  • react-redux (^4.0.0)
  • redux-devtools
    • use npm run dev:nw to display in a separate window.
  • redux-thunk middleware
• Karma
  • Mocha w/ Chai, Sinon-Chai, and Chai-as-Promised
  • PhantomJS
  • Code coverage reports
• Babel
  • react-transform-hmr for hot reloading
  • react-transform-catch-errors with redbox-react for more visible error reporting
  • Uses babel runtime rather than inline transformations
• Webpack
  • Separates application code from vendor dependencies
  • webpack-dev-server
  • sass-loader with CSS extraction
  • Pre-configured folder aliases and globals
• ESLint
  • Uses Airbnb's ESLint config (with some softened rules)
  • Includes separate test-specific .eslintrc to work with Mocha and Chai

Getting Started

Just clone the repo and install the necessary node modules:

$ git clone https://github.com/davezuko/react-redux-starter-kit.git ReduxStarterApp
$ cd ReduxStarterApp
$ npm install                   # Install Node modules listed in ./package.json (may take a while the first time)
$ npm start                     # Compile and launch

Usage

npm start (alias for npm run dev)

Runs the webpack build system with webpack-dev-server (by default found at localhost:3000).

npm run dev:nw

Same as npm run start but opens the debug tools in a new window.

Note: you'll need to allow popups in Chrome, or you'll see an error: issue 110

npm run dev:no-debug

Same as npm run start but disables devtools.

npm run compile

Runs the webpack build system with your current NODE_ENV and compiles the application to disk (~/dist).

npm run test

Runs unit tests with Karma and generates coverage reports.

npm run test:dev

Similar to npm run test, but will watch for changes and re-run tests; does not generate coverage reports.

npm run lint

Runs ESLint against all .js files in ~/src. This used to be a webpack preloader, but the browser console output could get fairly ugly. If you want development-time linting, consider using an eslint plugin for your text editor.

npm run lint:tests

Lints all .spec.js files in of ~/tests.

npm run deploy

Helper script to run linter, tests, and then, on success, compile your application to disk.

Configuration

Basic project configuration can be found in ~/config/index.js. Here you'll be able to redefine your src and dist directories, add/remove aliases, tweak your vendor dependencies, and more. For the most part, you should be able to make your changes in here without ever having to touch the webpack build configuration.

Structure

The folder structure provided is only meant to serve as a guide, it is by no means prescriptive. It is something that has worked very well for me and my team, but use only what makes sense to you.

.
├── bin                      # Build/Start scripts
├── build                    # All build-related configuration
│   └── webpack              # Environment-specific configuration files for webpack
├── config                   # Project configuration settings
├── src                      # Application source code
│   ├── actions              # Redux action creators
│   ├── components           # Generic React Components (generally Dumb components)
│   ├── containers           # Components that provide context (e.g. Redux Provider)
│   ├── layouts              # Components that dictate major page structure
│   ├── reducers             # Redux reducers
│   ├── routes               # Application route definitions
│   ├── store                # Redux store configuration
│   ├── utils                # Generic utilities
│   ├── views                # Components that live at a route
│   └── app.js               # Application bootstrap and rendering
└── tests                    # Unit tests

Components vs. Views vs. Layouts

TL;DR: They're all components.

This distinction may not be important for you, but as an explanation: A Layout is something that describes an entire page structure, such as a fixed navigation, viewport, sidebar, and footer. Most applications will probably only have one layout, but keeping these components separate makes their intent clear. Views are components that live at routes, and are generally rendered within a Layout. What this ends up meaning is that, with this structure, nearly everything inside of Components ends up being a dumb component.

Webpack

Configuration

The webpack compiler configuration is located in ~/build/webpack. Here you'll find configurations for each environment; development, production, and development_hot exist out of the box. These configurations are selected based on your current NODE_ENV, with the exception of development_hot which will always be used by webpack dev server.

Note: There has been a conscious decision to keep development-specific configuration (such as hot-reloading) out of .babelrc. By doing this, it's possible to create cleaner development builds (such as for teams that have a dev -> stage -> production workflow) that don't, for example, constantly poll for HMR updates.

So why not just disable HMR? Well, as a further explanation, enabling react-transform-hmr in .babelrc but building the project without HMR enabled (think of running tests with NODE_ENV=development but without a dev server) causes errors to be thrown, so this decision also alleviates that issue.

Vendor Bundle

You can redefine which packages to treat as vendor dependencies by editing vendor_dependencies in ~/config/index.js. These default to:

[
  'history',
  'react',
  'react-redux',
  'react-router',
  'redux-router',
  'redux'
]

Aliases

As mentioned in features, the default webpack configuration provides some globals and aliases to make your life easier. These can be used as such:

// current file: ~/src/views/some/nested/View.js
import SomeComponent from '../../../components/SomeComponent'; // without alias
import SomeComponent from 'components/SomeComponent'; // with alias

Available aliases:

actions     => '~/src/actions'
components  => '~/src/components'
constants   => '~/src/constants'
containers  => '~/src/containers'
layouts     => '~/src/layouts'
reducers    => '~/src/reducers'
routes      => '~/src/routes'
services    => '~/src/services'
store       => `~/src/store`
styles      => '~/src/styles'
utils       => '~/src/utils'
views       => '~/src/views'

Globals

These are global variables available to you anywhere in your source code. If you wish to modify them, they can be found as the globals key in ~/config/index.js.

__DEV__

True when process.env.NODE_ENV is development

__PROD__

True when process.env.NODE_ENV is production

__DEBUG__

True when the compiler is run with --debug (any environment).

Styles

All .scss imports will be run through the sass-loader and extracted during production builds. If you're importing styles from a base styles directory (useful for generic, app-wide styles), you can make use of the styles alias, e.g.:

// current file: ~/src/components/some/nested/component/index.jsx
import 'styles/core.scss'; // this imports ~/src/styles/core.scss

Furthermore, this styles directory is aliased for sass imports, which further eliminates manual directory traversing; this is especially useful for importing variables/mixins.

Here's an example:

// current file: ~/src/styles/some/nested/style.scss
// what used to be this (where base is ~/src/styles/_base.scss):
@import '../../base';

// can now be this:
@import 'base';

Testing

To add a unit test, simply create a .spec.js file anywhere in ~/tests. Karma will pick up on these files automatically, and Mocha and Chai will be available within your test without the need to import them.

Coverage reports will be compiled to ~/coverage by default. If you wish to change what reporters are used and where reports are compiled, you can do so by modifying coverage_reporters in ~/config/index.js.

Utilities

This boilerplate comes with two simple utilities (thanks to StevenLangbroek) to help speed up your Redux development process. In ~/client/utils you'll find exports for createConstants and createReducer. The former is pretty much an even lazier keyMirror, so if you really hate typing out those constants you may want to give it a shot. Check it out:

import { createConstants } from 'utils';

export default createConstants(
  'TODO_CREATE',
  'TODO_DESTROY',
  'TODO_TOGGLE_COMPLETE'
);

The other utility, create-reducer, is designed to expedite creating reducers when they're defined via an object map rather than switch statements. As an example, what once looked like this:

import { TODO_CREATE } from 'constants/todo';

const initialState = [];
const handlers = {
  [TODO_CREATE] : (state, payload) => { ... }
};

export default function todo (state = initialState, action) {
  const handler = handlers[action.type];

  return handler ? handler(state, action.payload) : state;
}

Can now look like this:

import { TODO_CREATE }   from 'constants/todo';
import { createReducer } from 'utils';

const initialState = [];

export default createReducer(initialState, {
  [TODO_CREATE] : (state, payload) => { ... }
});

Troubleshooting

Nothing yet. Having an issue? Report it and I'll get to it as soon as possible!