Static React and CSS Modules

A React, Webpack and CSS Modules project that generates static markup. All markup is generated in /build from /src. If you’re interested in learning more about the inner workings of this project you can check out the tutorial on CSS-Tricks:

📕 CSS Modules and React 📕

Getting started

Hop into the terminal:

1. npm install
2. npm start

BrowserSync will then open up a new tab where you can start to make new components and templates as you see fit.

Workflow

React is used in this project not to build a complex web app but instead to organise bundles of CSS and JS in order to write maintainable code and create static markup. This is what our directory structure looks like:

/src
  /components
    /Button
      Button.js
      styles.css
    /Title
      Title.js
      style.css

So in Button.js we create a standard React component and we import its styles so that Webpack can generate custom classnames:

import React from 'react'
import btn from './styles.css'

export default class CoolButton extends React.Component {
    render(){
        return (
            <button className={btn.red}>{this.props.text}</button>
        )
    }
}

And then we import that React component into one of the templates, such as src/templates/Home.js:

import React from 'react'
import CoolButton from '../components/Button/Button'

export default class Home extends React.Component {
  render() {
    return (
        <div>
            <h1>Home page</h1>
            <p>This is a home page</p>
            <CoolButton text='A super cool button'/>
        </div>
    )
  }
}

This way we get to generate custom classnames like CSS Modules but we also get some of the templating benefits of React.

Improvements

Since this is a concept for how you might want to organise your markup and CSS, this project contains as few dependencies as possible. I haven’t added Sass or PostCSS loaders into the Webpack config, and this project doesn’t support image files either.

Issues

This is really just a proof of concept, but if you feel like there’s anything I’ve missed then don’t hesitate to open an issue.