Xmartlabs Create React Boilerplate

Contributing to this Boilerplate

Make sure you have the appropriate version of Node (20.8.1) and NPM (10.1.0) installed.

Then install the required packages:

npm install

Starting the Project

npm run start

Running Tests

npm run test

Running Storybook

npm run storybook

Generate a Project with this Boilerplate

For this we recommend using degit

1. Download the master branch of a repo from GitHub to the current working directory:

npx degit@latest xmartlabs/react-template-xmartlabs my-new-project-name

If the second argument is omitted, the repo will be cloned to the current directory.

2. Move to my new project folder:

cd my-new-project-name

3. Initialize a Git repository

git init

You'll have to link it to the project remote manually.

4. Install the required packages:

npm install

And that's it! now you are ready to build on top, the commands to start, test and run storybook are listed above.

Project structure

The src directory has the following structure:

• assets: This directory contains all global assets. This includes images and stylesheets used in multiple components.
• common: React components used across multiple pages of the SPA.
• config: Global app configuration files go here (e.g. a constants file).
• helpers: Javascript files that provide helper functions to the app. These are not React components.
• hocs: Higher Order Components are stored here.
• hooks: directory for generic React hooks that can be reused across components.
• networking: Includes all code related to networking.
  • controllers: All controllers of the app go here.
  • serializers: All serializers of the app go here.
  • types: All information regarding typing of networking data.
• pages: React components that are entrypoints for a page of the SPA.
• routes: All configuration related to routing of the pages goes here.

Routing

This project uses React Router to generate routing between the pages. We've created an abstraction over React Router to make it safer to operate with paths and have some other useful helpers. This section explains how this abstraction works and how to add a new route.

Routing structure

Our main objective is to have routes declared centrally and reused across the app. This avoids common issues like typos when writing paths. Configuration of the routes is stored on src/routes/routes.ts. We store information of the routes, such as the name of the route, path and component. More information can be added to the routes object, considering it is later passed as props to the Route component of React Router.

Some helpers have been defined, such as AppLink and AppRedirect. These are wrappers of the typical Link and Redirect of React Router. The advantage of these helpers is that they provide a different props API. Instead of having a to prop where you just pass the exact path and query string, they accept three different props:

• routeName: The name of the target route. Obtained from the routes file as detailed above.
• pathParams: A map of path params. Examples below.
• queryParams: A map of query params. Examples below.

It is highly encouraged that you use these helpers instead of the native ones of React Router. If you need more functionality, implement it on the helpers directly. Another useful helper is the useGoToPage hook, which is a function that receives the same parameters. This hook replaces usage of the useNavigate hook.

Creating a Route

• Create a new page component on the pages directory. This component will serve as an entrypoint to the page.
• Add a name for the new route on src/routes/routes.ts. Then, on the same file, add an entry to the routes object specifying the path and any other configuration of the route.
• Add the name and related component to the RouteComponent dictionary on src/routes/route-component.ts.

And that's it. If you defined the path correctly you should be able to access the component on that route. There are already examples on all of these files, so you should be able to follow them.

NOTE: please define routes in order of specificity (more specific routes should come before) to avoid a less specific route matching before. You can also add the exact: true configuration option to the route on src/routes/routes.ts to avoid matching less specific routes.

Using the helpers

Let's imagine we have a route to the homepage /home and we have named it home on our routes object. In order to link to it from another page we must render an AppLink component like so:

<AppLink routeName={RouteName.Home} />

This will route your page to /home once clicked. Let's assume the route also receives a path parameter id (/home/:id) and also we want to pass some query parameters. Path parameters and query parameters are specified by Javascript objects, like this:

<AppLink
  routeName={RouteName.Home}
  pathParams={{ id: 'foo' }}
  queryParams={{ bar: 'baz', bar2: 'baz2' }}
>

This link will link to /home/foo?bar=baz&bar2=baz2. It's worth noting that the Redirect component also has the same prop interface, and the useGoToPage hook returns a function that accepts three parameters with the same names, so you should feel at home when using all three of them. Here's how to use the hook:

const MyComponent = () => {
  const goToPage = useGoToPage();

  const navigate = () => {
    // Assume RouteName.UserDetail equals '/users/:id'
    // Navigates to `/users/foo?bar=baz`
    goToPage(RouteName.UserDetail, { id: "foo" }, { bar: "baz" });
  };

  return <button onClick={navigate}>Navigate!</button>;
};

Route Layout

There's a RouteLayout component which wraps all routes. It's used for rendering components inside the scope of the router but in a way that every route is wrapped. You should only change this component if you need to add functionality that spans all routes and that requires being inside the scope of the router to work.

Component Layouts

Most of the times multiple pages of your app will share similar features. For example, 90% of your pages might have a navbar and a footer. It's really not practical to go around placing a navbar on ALL of your pages manually. Component layouts come to the rescue!

You'll find a Higher Order Component named withLayout on the hocs directory. This component is quite simple, it simply wraps the component in a Layout component, expecting also a parameter named layoutType.

The Layout component will be your best friend. It's only a matter of defining what layout types you want to have and then implement them inside this component. You might have a layout that only includes a navbar, or one that only has a footer, or both. Even one that doesn't have anything except the wrapped component.

You can apply the HOC like so:

withLayout(LayoutType.MyLayoutType, Component);

This could turn your Component from this:

<div>
  <h1>My component</h1>
</div>

To this:

<div>
  <Navbar>
  <div>
    <h1>My component</h1>
  </div>
  <Footer>
</div>

It's just an example though. Be mindful of components you'll probably need across multiple pages and a layout will probably help you include them seamlessly! Remember though that not everything can be solved with a layout.

Networking

This is a very compact section that explains networking. For a more in-depth explanation refer to this blogpost on the subject.

"Networking" in this context means communication between the frontend and any kind of backend or service we need to consume. And it can be hard sometimes. APIs can sometimes change unexpectedly or be badly organized in terms of the data they provide. It's the job of the developer to protect its frontend against the backend menace.

That's why this project implements a particular networking pattern that involves three distinct elements:

• Controllers: handle the specific networking calls needed to fetch data or modify the state of the system on the backend.
• Serializers: receive fresh data from the controller and transform it to remove unnecessary data, rename fields and prepare it to be used by the application.

Controllers

All networking calls must be made in controllers. They are in charge of knowing where to go to fetch data, what kind of HTTP method to use, etc. You'll probably make a request at some point that returns data. Controllers are also in charge of deserializing the data via a serializer. Here's an example:

// src/networking/controllers/example-controller.ts
import { ExampleSerializer } from "networking/serializers/example-serializer";
import { ApiService } from "networking/api-service";
import { API_ROUTES } from "networking/api-routes";

class ExampleController {
  static async getExamples() {
    const response = await ApiService.get<RawExample[]>(API_ROUTES.EXAMPLE);
    return (response.data || []).map(ExampleSerializer.deSerialize);
  }

  static createExample(example: Example) {
    const serializedExample = ExampleSerializer.serialize(example);
    return ApiService.post(API_ROUTES.EXAMPLE, {
      example: serializedExample,
    });
  }
}

export { ExampleController };

This controller has two methods: getExamples and createExamples. The first method attempts to get a list of examples from the backend. Once the data arrives the controller will attempt to deserialize the data via the ExampleSerializer and then create instances of Example from each.

The second method illustrates how we would go about sending data to the backend. In this case we do the inverse process as before: given an instance of Example the controller will attempt to serialize (as opposed to deserialize) it and send it as payload.

Let's look at how exactly serializers work.

Serializers

Serializers act as a sort of firewall (or customs, if you will) of data by deserializing data served by the API. Any kind of structured data that is returned by the API should be deserialized. Any data sent to the API should, in turn, be serialized.

The advantage of this is that you can redefine the fields of the data and remove unused ones. This protects our frontend from unexpected changes in: key naming, JSON structure and other kinds of issues. Here's an example:

// src/networking/serializers/example-serializer.ts
class ExampleSerializer {
  static deSerialize(data: RawExample): Example {
    return {
      foo: data.Foobaz,
      bar: data.Barbaz,
    };
  }

  static serialize(example: Example): RawExample {
    return {
      Foobaz: example.foo,
      Barbaz: example.bar,
    };
  }
}

export { ExampleSerializer };

When deserializing in this (admittedly simple) example the ExampleSerializer receives an instance of RawExample and returns an instance of SerializedExample. In this case we're simplifying the keys of the JSON we've received, by removing the common suffix baz. When serializing we're restoring the example to the format the API will understand.

Types

When working with Typescript it's best to have specific types for everything. In this case we've defined the types like so:

// src/networking/types/example.d.ts
type RawExample = {
  Foobaz: string;
  Barbaz: number;
};

type SerializedExample = {
  foo: string;
  bar: number;
};

Types are defined separately so that the types can be accessible throughout the app without need to import the serializer each time.

Component Styling

React apps can be styled in multiple ways. This project supports and is built to use CSS Modules on Sass to style React components. This section explains how to style components and what to take into account.

Local Styles

Components will probably need CSS that is local to them. If you need to do this simply create a Sass file with the same base name as the component, and under the same directory. For example:

// src/components/button/button.tsx
import React from "react";

import styles from "./button.module.scss";

const Button = () => (
  <button className={styles.container}>
    This is a<span className={styles.highlight}>button!</span>
  </button>
);

export { Button };

/* src/components/button/button.module.scss */
.container {
  width: 100px;
}

.highlight {
  font-weight: bold;
}

Our PostCSS plugin will mangle the names of the classes inside any module (make sure you name modules with the .module.scss extension or this won't work) to reduce the probability of collisions between classes across multiple components. In this case, for instance, the name of the container class will be changed to something like button__container__23h2k.

Global Styles

Typically when using Sass you'll probably have global stylesheets that can be imported and reused across other Sass files. Global styles in this project are stored on src/assets/stylesheets directory. There you'll find:

• base-styles.scss: file that sets the default styles for elements. Helps normalize styles across the whole page. Try to keep these as limited as possible, avoid over-styling elements.
• breakpoints.scss: breakpoint-related file. Exports container classes and some other magic. (More on this on following sections)
• colors.scss: compilation of all color variables used in the project.
• fonts.scss: font-face configurations of all fonts used on the project. Not needed unless you're using locally-stored fonts.
• global-styles.module.scss: global module that exports conflicting classes (more on this below).
• mixins.scss: file that includes all mixins used on the project.
• text-styles.scss: includes all text-style classes used on the project. Typically used along with design systems (more on this below).
• variables.scss: generic variables like sizes, paddings, z-indexes and such.

Breakpoints

It's quite usual for web apps to be designed around containers. These are containers (for lack of a better word) that take on different sizes depending on the size of the screen. What size they take and at what breakpoints they change sizes depends on the design of the page. Luckily this project allows for quick configuration of breakpoints and containers.

On the variables.scss file you'll find the breakpoints variable that looks something like this:

$breakpoints: (
  xl: 1400px,
  lg: 1200px,
  md: 992px,
  sm: 768px,
  xs: 576px,
);

Each breakpoint is identified by its biggest threshold. For example, the small breakpoint (sm) is for screens with width between 577px and 768px. You can modify, add and remove breakpoints as long as the order is preserved (biggest first).

Sometimes you might need to display items in rows. We've got support for that! The genericItemContainer class will automatically display its direct children in rows. You can quickly configure how many items you want to see on each row per threshold by modifying the items-per-row variable, which looks something like this:

$items-per-row: (
  xl: 5,
  lg: 4,
  md: 3,
  sm: 2,
  xs: 2,
  xxs: 1,
);

On the xl breakpoint the container will render rows of five items, but on the sm breakpoint rows allow at most two items. Note that in order for this to work like it does, the items are sized pixel-perfect(ly). One caveat of this is that the generic item container must be used directly inside a genericContainer, otherwise measurements will fail and everything will look really bad.

Text Styles

Design systems will sometimes define text styles centrally and reference them across the whole design of the product. This is ideal for developers since it allows us to easily replicate the design system on the codebase and reference styles centrally.

The text-styles.scss file is meant to be used to document the text styles of the design system. Using mixins to generate the classes with less code is a good idea.

Caveats

Sass is great, CSS Modules is great. Together, they have the potential of becoming a powerhouse in frontend styling. Sadly their integration has some caveats.

Importing a Sass file from a module

It's important to know that the Sass transpiler runs before the modules are interpreted. Let's assume you have a module file named my-module.module.scss. Inside that file we import a different Sass file wich defines a generic class.

/* my-module.module.scss */
@import "path/to/a/file.scss";

.container {
  @extend .generic;
  font-size: 15px;
}

/* path/to/a/file.scss */

.generic {
  width: 100%;
  height: 100%;
}

Due to how modules work, each time we import that generic file a new set of classes will be generated, effectively duplicating its code each time we import it from a module. This is completely undesireable since it generates useless amounts of CSS. There's no simple solution to this, other than applying a simple rule: never import a Sass file that is transpiled to non-empty CSS from a module. You are allowed to import files that don't generate CSS by themselves. A file that defines some mixins is allowed, since it doesn't transpile to actual CSS.

Want to have some generic classes to use on components? Import the file from the component itself and not from the Sass module:

import React from "react";

import myLocalModule from "./my-component.module.scss";
import myGlobalModule from "../../assets/stylesheets/global-module.module.scss";

const MyComponent = () => (
  <div className={[myLocalModule.container, myGlobalModule.generic].join(" ")}>
    {/* More code here */}
  </div>
);

export { MyComponent };

This will ensure that only a central version of the global CSS code is used. This project includes a file named global-styles.module.scss that should be used to export all global CSS.

Stylelint

In order to maintain a similar coding style across projects, we use Stylelint in a similar way we use Eslint. Stylelint runs by using the command npm run sass-lint and using the configuration under Stylelint file.

Docker Configuration

A Dockerfile and a .dockerignore have been added to this project. The main reason to use Docker is to generate a production build, it is not intended for use for development.

In fact, the Dockerfile has instructions only for generating the production-ready build. The idea is to run the image connected to a volume, to which the static files will be copied once the image is run. You only need to define a volume and point it to the correct target. Inside the container the target should be the host-build directory, you can choose how you map that on your host machine.

How to run:

docker build --tag IMAGE_NAME
docker run --name CONTAINER_NAME --mount type=bind,source=PATH/TO/TARGET,target=/code/host-build IMAGE_NAME

Where PATH/TO/TARGET is the path on your local machine where the files will be copied to.