Coffee React Quickstart

Quickstart for creating React.js web applications.

It has a number of nice goodies baked in including:

• Live reloading for both CSS and Javascript! This really speeds up development. Live reloading is powered by the Webpack module bundler and react-hot-loader projects.
• Write your JSX in Coffeescript thanks to coffee-react-transform.
• Amazing URL-driven-development (UDD) with the react-router project.
• Uses Gulp for building CSS and Javascript. Run cult watch for rebuilding css/js on the fly while developing and cult build to create minified versions for deploying to production.
• Includes sensible element stylings and several useful Sass plugins:
  • Susy: best-of-breed grid system.
  • modular-scale: easily create pleasing modular type scales.
  • Sassy Buttons: flexible button styling.
  • Breakpoint: Super simple media queries.

Install dependencies

Clone this repo and then after entering the new directory run npm install and bundle install. This will install the respective NPM and Ruby Gem dependencies.

You'll also need to have cult/gulp installed globally to run the coffeescript gulpfile: npm install -g gulp cult

Development

Run in the root of your directory: cult watch

This will watch the src directories and build on changes and placed the built css and js files in the public directory. It'll serve everything in the /public directory at localhost:8080

Then try editing src/scripts/hello_world.cjsx and see your changes magically show up in your browser with no page reload!

If styles don't show up

Restart cult watch and reload your browser.

The problem is that I have Webpack setup to package CSS for the browser but we're using Sass/Compass before Webpack. On the first run, the public/main.css file is empty as Sass hasn't done its thing yet so Webpack requires an empty file and no styles show up in the browser. On the next start of cult watch the public/main.css file has been compiled by Sass so styles will now show up in the browser.

Production build

To build for production, simply run cult build

Demo

Try out the example app included with this quickstart: http://kyleamathews.github.io/coffee-react-quickstart/