Example React Component Library

This project is created by this template.

This is an example react component library. It's bundled with Rollup and it does not offer custom styling as intended to use with one specific design style.

It consists following components:

• List

Development

Testing

npm run test

Building

npm run build

Storybook

To run a live-reload Storybook server on your local machine:

npm run storybook

To export your Storybook as static files:

npm run storybook:export

You can then serve the files under storybook-static using S3, GitHub pages, Express etc. I've hosted this library at: https://www.harveydelaney.com/react-component-library

Generating New Components

I've included a handy NodeJS util file under util called create-component.js. Instead of copy pasting components to create a new component, you can instead run this command to generate all the files you need to start building out a new component. To use it:

npm run generate YourComponentName

This will generate:

/src
  /YourComponentName
    YourComponentName.tsx
    YourComponentName.stories.tsx
    YourComponentName.test.tsx
    YourComponentName.types.ts
    YourComponentName.module.scss

The default templates for each file can be modified under util/templates.

Don't forget to add the component to your index.ts exports if you want the library to export the component!

Installing Component Library Locally

Let's say you have another project (test-app) on your machine that you want to try installing the component library into without having to first publish the component library. In the test-app directory, you can run:

npm i --save ../example-component-library

which will install the local component library as a dependency in test-app. It'll then appear as a dependency in package.json like:

  ...
  "dependencies": {
    ...
    "example-component-library": "file:../example-component-library",
    ...
  },
  ...

Your components can then be imported and used in that project.

NOTE: After installing the component library locally, you may run into:

Invalid hook call. Hooks can only be called inside of the body of a function component. This could happen for one of the following reasons:

You might have mismatching versions of React and the renderer (such as React DOM)
You might be breaking the Rules of Hooks
You might have more than one copy of React in the same app See for tips about how to debug and fix this problem.

This is the most commonly encountered problem people face when installing the library locally. This is most likely due to the third reason: You might have more than one copy of React in the app.

Normally when a library is published, dev dependencies are excluded. However, when the library is symlinked, all local dev depdendencies are persisted in the libraries node_modules (includes React). Your bundler may see two versions of React, one in the consuming app and one in the symlinked library. The solution is to have the component library use the React version in the consuming app. So from your component library folder, run:

npm link ../test-app/node_modules/react

OR, if you are using Webpack in app you can follow this GitHub comment.

Read more about this issue here.

Publishing

Hosting via NPM

First, make sure you have an NPM account and are logged into NPM using the npm login command.

Then update the name field in package.json to reflect your NPM package name in your private or public NPM registry. Then run:

npm publish

The "prepublishOnly": "npm run build" script in package.json will execute before publish occurs, ensuring the build/ directory and the compiled component library exist.

Hosting via GitHub

I recommend you host the component library using NPM. However, if you don't want to use NPM, you can use GitHub to host it instead.

You'll need to remove build/ from .gitignore, build the component library (npm run build), add, commit and push the contents of build. See this branch for an example.

You can then install your library into other projects by running:

npm i --save git+https://github.com/keremciu/example-library.git#branch-name

OR

npm i --save github:keremciu/example-library#branch-name

Usage

Let's say you created a public NPM package called example-component-library with the TestComponent component created in this repository.

Usage of the component (after the library installed as a dependency into another project) will be:

import React from "react";
import { List } from "example-component-library";

const App = () => (
  <div className="app-container">
    <h1>Hello I'm consuming the example component library</h1>
    <List<TItem>
      data={items}
      infoRenderer={(item, key) => <span>{item[key]}</span>}
    />
  </div>
);

export default App;