How should be the project architecture ( or structure ) of React + Electron? - reactjs

Last week, I've started building a desktop application with electron and I want to integrate React with it.
Electron official documentation does not provide a detailed Framework Integration section.
So, I've tried to do some googling and I've found a useful article about converting Create React App to electron application.
However, I just get confused about the project structure and how to make sure that I have everything to take my app into production ( React + Electron ) without tears in the future.
Where should I put my renderers?
How these renders can handle React Pages or React Components?
Please, would you guide me to set up React-Electron for a production-ready application?
My current structure
The main.js is the main file ( process ) for Electron.

It doesn't really matter too much about your structure provided you have one and it makes sense.
I'm the developer of secure-electron-template, which is a react/electron template so I'll share with you the format of this project and you can use this as a template if you'd like.
app/
electron/
main.js <-- BrowserWindow gets created here, event handlers, etc.
menu.js <-- Custom menu is defined here
preload.js <-- Preload code is here
src/
components/ <-- Reusable .jsx components
core/ <-- The root wrapper element of the app (contains a store, page router)
pages/ <-- Each page of the app (.jsx and .css).
home/
home.jsx
home.css
about/
about.jsx
about.css
redux/ <-- Page routing code, may not be specific to you
index.html <-- Root html page
index.jsx <-- Root element that renders the root wrapper element
dist/ <-- Gets auto-created
node_modules/
resources/
icon.icns
icon.ico
icon.png
etc...
test/ <-- Contains test scripts
.gitignore
.babelrc
package.json
README.md
webpack.config.js

Related

how should webpack be configured for scss files in a react app?

Let's say I have a React app with a directory structure like this:
- components
-- framework
--- atoms
---- atoms.scss
---- Button.js
---- ...
--- molecules
---- molecules.scss
---- FormField.js
---- ...
So all of the basic framework components (button, input, etc) are included in that directory. Along with the supporting scss files for those components. My impression is that the typical app configuration would be to configure webpack for the app so that it uses a pattern to bundle all of the nested scss file from the "framework" directory shown above. Am I understanding that correctly?
How would I go about doing that in a React app? I've never personally configured webpack for a React app. Also, should that Webpack configuration and bundling process make all scss files from the framework dir tree automatically available for all components in the app? Ie a user-admin component in the app would be able to import the FormField component from the tree above without having to explicitly import any type of supporting scss file? Or would some type of general import for the bundled scss still explicitly be needed for this. Eg - import "framework.scss"?

React Next.js build 2 themed apps from 1 app

I have a single app and want to build 2 packages each with its own theme served via the public folder.
App theme folder structure:
src/
themes/
meetings/
assets/
weddings/
assets/
How do I configure next so at build time I get a single theme in the public/ folder via a flag or some other mechanism?
Desired public/ folder output when running next build --flag weddings or whatever the proper syntax would be:
public/
theme/
weddings/
assets/
This way my components could reference /theme/${themeName}/assets/... to pull in specific images, icons, text, etc. with the same file name.
Everything that I have searched for showed info for dark/light mode theme toggling, which is not what I am looking for, I just want to build and ship an individually themed app from a single app to host on 2 different websites.
FYI - I already have a mechanism to determine and set the themeName to be consumed in the React components, just looking for the How To in next.js config.

Gradually add react elements to a Django project using Create React App and yarn build

I have a project using Django as backend and raw HTML, CSS and JS. I have tons of templates and I want to start migrating some parts of the frontend website to React.
I started creating one single landing page in react using the official tutorial
and until here everything went well, just a bit tedious having to build and manually move static js and css created to django templates:
yarn build
go to django static folder and replace minified js and css files by the new ones
go to django templates (html) and replace new reference to new files
But then I wanted to create a new independent component not related to the landingpage I created and i culdn't find the best approach to do it without duplicating react create app folder.
The goal is to do yarn build and have one single js and css file per independent element.
For example, if I have:
index.js
Element1.js
Element2.js
...
After doing yarn build, I have:
build/
static/
css/
elem1.54aa3f3f.css
elem2.jsby6syb.css
js/
elem1.54aa3f3f.js
elem2.jsby6syb.js
The colser I've been to this, is having in my index.js file one render per independent element, but then it creates only one single js and css file and it requires to have both div ids (elem1 and elem2) in the django template, causing error if one of them is not present:
ReactDOM.render(
<React.StrictMode>
<elem1 />
</React.StrictMode>,
document.getElementById("elem1")
);
ReactDOM.render(
<React.StrictMode>
<elem2 />
</React.StrictMode>,
document.getElementById("elem2")
);
The only single way I could achieve the desired result is duplicating the folder project for each element, meaning duplicating all node modules, src files ... and going in each folder doing yarn build:
Could you please be so kind indicating the best approach? Maybe modifying build command and creating some bash scripts?

Embedding full react application into an existing web page

I'm looking to embed my react application into an existing plain html / javascript website. What I've found so far is that you are only able to embed individual components into existing websites, not entire react applications.
Naturally I have an app component which contains the entire application. Am I able to embed the full application by embedding this component? My concern is all the modules I'm using (e.g. axios, bootstrap) will break.
I've been looking for a good tutorial on how to do this but I'm not finding many examples of trying to embed the entire application into an existing page.
My understanding of how to do this, is to reference the react javascript source links in the html page head, possibly also babel although its unclear to me if babel will work. Then we can use the renderDom method like we normally would.
On page load can I run my index.js file to insert my react app component into the dom? If this would work, are there any issues with file structure, file updates I would need to take care of?
If I'm driving off path out into the wilderness and there is a better way to handle it I'm open to suggestions. I'm just looking to see if someone else has experience doing this before I start down a bad path.
I was able to embed my full react application by doing the following...
I built my react app production files with npm run build
I copied those files into the existing web project at the root level
Then I opened the index.html file generated from npm run build and copied the scripts in the head and body sections to the page I wanted to drop in my application
Finally I added a div with the id root (this is what my renderDOM method is looking for) where I wanted my application to appear on the existing web page.
That was it. Super easy, thanks for the help!
Just wanted to add a quick additional approach here.
If you already have a Flask app and you're trying to put React components or an app (so the base component of an app) onto an existing HTML page in the Flask app, basically the only thing that you need is Babel, unless you are able to write React components without using JSX (so in plain Javascript) in which case you'd need nothing.
Step 1: To attach Babel to your project, you'll have to grab the Babel node modules which means your project will be associated with NPM for the sole purpose of using the Babel functions. You can do this by running the following commands in your project root directory (Node.js must be installed):
npm init -y
npm install babel-cli#6 babel-preset-react-app#3
Step 2: Once Babel is attached to your project, you'll have to actually transpile the existing React component .js files from JSX into plain Javascript like so:
npx babel --watch (jsdirectory) --out-dir (outputdirectory) --presets react-app/prod
where (jsdirectory) is the path to the directory where your React component files written using JSX are, and (outputdirectory) is where you want your translated files to show up--use . for (outputdirectory) to have transpiled files appear in your root directory.
Step 3: After the plain Javascript versions of your React files appear, make sure they are linked to your HTML page instead of the original JSX-utilizing files (replace the original script tag's .js file)
Step 4: Make sure the HTML page in question is linked to the .CSS files you want (they will modify the transpiled Javascript in the same manner as they did the JSX files in a project made using Create-React-App because the class names are the same) as well as the required React resources:
<script src="https://unpkg.com/react#16/umd/react.production.min.js" crossorigin></script>
<script src="https://unpkg.com/react-dom#16/umd/react-dom.production.min.js" crossorigin></script>
After you do those quick steps your React components should render no problem on that page in your Python-Flask application.

How to integrate a react application in drupal 8, using drupal custom module?

I am very new to react and drupal 8. I know to create custom modules in drupal and react SPAs, but I m not able to call my react app using a drupal8 controller .
Can someone please make me clear of the flow and the correct way to integrate react app in drupal 8?
So there isn't really a good means of calling a React application from within the regular Drupal controller layer or in the twig templates of Drupal 8.
There are two ways people usually connect a React Application to D8.
Option 1 - Progressively decoupled sites - This is where Drupal still uses the TWIG engine to generate the vast majority of the site views, and can use React for some small part of the site while communicating with Drupal through a Drupal based webservice. Check out this project for more information - https://www.drupal.org/project/pdb. This is a nice option if you just want to add a small React based widget, but want to keep the bulk of your site in using standard TWIG.
Option 2 - Fully decouples sites - This is where you render 100% of your applications view layer using React, and just use Drupal as a CMS that provides a web service. There are multiple options for the webservice portion including https://www.drupal.org/project/graphql and https://www.drupal.org/docs/8/api/restful-web-services-api/restful-web-services-api-overview. So an example of this would be serving a create-react-app on a static server and communication with D8 through a web service.
Here is some additional information that might help guide your decision.
https://dri.es/how-to-decouple-drupal-in-2018
Best of luck!
Long post with some assumptions(but it works):
I was seeking to achieve the same (Drupal 8 and react decoupled block), and I searched and searched, I found myself returning to this page more than once, so I will leave the little thing I discovered here.
My Assumptions:
you have created a custom block that has it's own twig template.
you have defined your libraries in your libraries file (we will review this)
you have created your react app in the root folder of your module with npx create-react-app my-app.
create-react-app my-app creates a react app inside my-app folder, my-app contains all the react code and configs. To get our app(custom react js library) to play well with drupal we will need to override somethings, like scripts to rename our files (build command),to something drupal can identify(recognize) and load.
Run yarn add react-app-rewired --dev, to download react app rewire, that let's us override the default react-app configs without having to eject our app.
In the root of your react-app folder, create a file named config-overrides.js that should contain the below code
module.exports = function override(config, env) {
config.optimization.runtimeChunk = false;
config.optimization.splitChunks = {
cacheGroups: {
default: false
}
};
return config;
};
and edit the scripts in in the package.json to
"build": "react-app-rewired build && yarn run build:dist",
"build:dist": "cd build && copy static\\js\\*.js main.js && copy static\\css\\*.css main.css",
NB: I have edited the build command and added the build:dist script (however if not on windows please
replace copy with cp and \\ with / in the build:dist). This will make sure every time you run the build script, your build files will be renamed to main.js and main.css without the filename..js/css which we can then reference in our libraries.yml file.
my modulename.libraries.yml looks like this (filename = modern_js_drupal.libraries.yml)
react_local:
version: 1.x
js:
my-app/build/main.js: {}
css:
layout:
my-app/build/main.css: {}
and my block.html.twig
<div class="row">
<div id="root">
<h4>React App</h4>
</div>
{{ attach_library('modern_js_drupal/react_local') }}
The reason I named my div 'root' and not anything else if because react app uses the same id when rendering your app.
Look into react_js/public/index.html and react_js/src/index.js. index.html provides the div to hook our app into and index.js renders the app on the div provided ( ReactDOM.render(<App />, document.getElementById('root'));), The advantage of this during development is, you get to create your app and view the changes instantly on your app (http://localhost:3000/) and you can later run yarn build to view the most recent changes on your drupal 8 site.

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