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SaverLife

We help people save $400

Architecture

The driving goal of the architecture of the boilerplate is separation of concerns. Namely:

  • Presentational components are separated from containers (aka "screens").

    Presentational components are small components that are concerned with how things look. Containers usually define whole application screens and are concerned with how things work: they include presentational components and wire everything together.

    If you are interested you can read more about it here.

  • State is managed using global Redux stores.

    When applications grow, sharing state and its changes can become very hard. Questions like "How can I access this data?" or "When did this change?" are common, just like passing data around components just to be able to use it in nested components.

    With Redux, state is shared using global stores, and changes are predictable: actions are applied by reducers to the state. While the pattern can be a bit much for small projects, the clear separation of responsibilities and predictability helps with bigger applications.

    If you are interested you can read more about it here.

  • Application side-effects (API calls, etc.) are separated from UI and state manipulation using Redux Saga.

    Using Redux Saga has two benefits: keeping application side-effects and related business logic out of UI components, as well as executing that logic in an asynchronous way without ending in callback hell.

    Sagas are triggered by Redux actions and can also trigger Redux actions to alter state. By using JavaScript generators (yield), sagas are written in a synchronous-like manner while still executing asynchronously.

Content

The boilerplate contains:

The boilerplate includes an example (displaying fake user data) from UI components to the saga. The example is easy to remove so that it doesn't get in the way.

Directory layout

For more information on each directory, click the link and read the directory's README.

Updates

The boilerplate will follow new React-Native releases as soon as libraries and tools used here are compatible.

Requirements

Node 8 or greater is required. Development for iOS requires a Mac and Xcode 9 or up, and will target iOS 9 and up.

You also need to install the dependencies required by React Native:

Starting work on this repo

  • clone this repository
  • install the npm dependencies by running yarn

Running the project

Assuming you have all the requirements installed, you can setup and run the project by running:

  • yarn install to install the dependencies
  • copy the config file that you wish to us from App/Config/ to [App/Config/index.js]. The dev config is named index.dev.js. The production config is index.prod.js
  • run the following steps for your platform

Android

  • only the first time you run the project, you need to generate a debug key with:
    • cd android/app
    • keytool -genkey -v -keystore debug.keystore -storepass android -alias androiddebugkey -keypass android -keyalg RSA -keysize 2048 -validity 10000
    • cd ../.. to come back to the root folder
  • yarn start to start the metro bundler, in a dedicated terminal
  • yarn android to run the Android application (remember to start a simulator or connect an Android phone)

iOS

  • cd ios
  • pod install to install pod dependencies
  • cd .. to come back to the root folder
  • yarn start to start the metro bundler, in a dedicated terminal
  • yarn ios to run the iOS application (remember to start a simulator or connect an iPhone phone)

Useful documentation

Deployment

Package dependencies

License

This project is released under the MIT License.

About us

TheCodingMachine is a web and mobile agency based in Paris and Lyon, France. We are constantly looking for new developers and team leaders and we love working with freelancers. You'll find an overview of all our open source projects on our website and on Github.

Alternative boilerplates

We looked into existing boilerplates before starting this project, and while many of them are awesome, we did not find what we were looking for.

The most popular is mcnamee's Starter Kit, which is unfortunately limited by Expo and misses Redux Saga.

If we look at the rest (and ignore unmaintained projects), many popular boilerplates are too opinionated: they include 3rd party services or very strong architecture choices that we are not comfortable with. To name a few: Snowflake runs with a Hapi Server running on Redhat OpenShift, Hasura's boilerplate uses Hasura's SaaS for authentication, Apollo's StarterKit is targeted at GraphQL using Apollo, the Meteor Boilerplate targets Meteor…

Finally some did not contain the architecture we are looking for (the separation of concerns with Redux, Sagas, etc.), for example re-start.

One interesting exception is Ignite IR Boilerplate "Andross", but after consideration we decided not to use it because of the large amount of unnecessary code/components it provided.