Antd Custom Theme in ReactJS without using .less - reactjs

I want to use Antd without importing the less in my ReactJS application. The major reason for that is that I am using the create-react-app boilerplate to create my application. Antd requires me to modify webpack.config.js to compile the less for deploying my code on any server. I don't want to bad code by modifying the webpack inside the node_modules and I don't have enough knowledge to use npm eject. Can anyone suggest to me a solution to use Antd with create-react-app?

It can be achieved with create-react-app without doing npm eject or modifying node modules. Below are some packages that you needed:
react-app-rewired: tweak the create-react-app webpack config(s) without using 'eject' and without creating a fork of the react-scripts.
customize-cra: we need customize-cra along with react-app-rewired due to new react-app-rewired#2.x issue.
babel-plugin-import: for importing components on demand.
less: default development language for styling in antd.
less-loader: compiler for translating less into css.
if you just want to change the color one time, here is a good article:
[3 Steps] Customize theme for Ant Design with create-react-app 2019
If you want to change it on runtime you need another package:
antd-theme-generator or antd-theme-webpack-plugin
A good article of using antd-theme-generator:
Change-Ant-Design-Theme-dynamically-in-React-Create-React-App
I've made an article on using antd-theme-webpack-plugin:
5 steps to change antd theme on runtime using create-react-app

Related

Building a UI lib with Storybook

I'm building a UI lib for my organization, I'm using react with material-ui as a peer dependency in the package.json of the lib. I wanted to add storybook to have a playground for the components I'm building but the problem is: My lib is built upon Material-ui, which as I said above, is a peer dependecy and Storybook doesn't find material-ui because it's a peer dependency of the projetct.
How should I deal with that?
It makes sense Storybook is not finding material-ui because it is supposed to be installed in the host project that is going to use my ui-lib. Installing material as a dependency is not the case since it would break whoever implements the lib. I tried to see something about the Lerna project, but I'm not very familiar with that.
I'm open to hear any ideas :)
I managed to find a workaround to this issue and wanted to share with the community. It's pretty silly but it works perfectly for my case.
I added #material-ui both as dev dependency and peer dependency to my package.json and removed it from dev dependecies on my Docker file when I added it to the aws pipeline. So on while coding we have #material-ui but on prod environment it is not there.
That solved it for me :)
I could also just do "npm uninstall #material-ui" before "npm publish"

How to edit config files in react-create-app?

I want to use some third-party packages upon react, which are:
https://ant.design/ - a design system
https://github.com/vazco/uniforms - for generating and validating forms.
I am using create-react-app for as a boilerplate
After installing all packages (with yarn) and running yart start I am getting this error:
How can I add #babel/plugin-proposal-class-properties without running yarn eject to modify .babelrc file?
Or is there any other solution for this problem?
It looks like the only way is to eject. CRA has purposely avoided too much customization. See https://github.com/facebook/create-react-app/issues/167

Configure antd after create-react-app eject

My react app was created with create-react-app and I added And Design following:
https://ant.design/docs/react/use-with-create-react-app
I even customized some less vars using:
https://ant.design/docs/react/use-with-create-react-app#Customize-Theme
Now, I ejected my app but everything stopped working.
EDIT1:
The first error is that after ejecting, the scripts configured in package.json no longer works, as described here:
https://github.com/ant-design/create-react-app-antd/issues/10
What are the steps to configure antd after ejecting create-react-app?
Thanks
You just need to run npm i react-scripts.
This will install the missing dependency you need to make this work.

Importing CSS in Semantic-UI-React

I will be using Semantic-UI-React in my project but I came across following issues:
Docs link : https://react.semantic-ui.com/usage#css
Docs say webpack 1 is supported but not recommended. I am using Create React App which comes with webpack version 1.14.0. So does that mean I should not use Semantic-UI-React with CRA?
For styling, I also want some custom styles in my project , so I went with third option of Semantic UI package mentioned in the docs..
npm install semantic-ui --save-dev runs gulp internally and creates a semantic folder. But there is no dist folder as mentioned in the docs. From which path I should refer the semantic.min.css in my index.js file?
I am basically trying to use Semantic-UI-React with semantic.min.css with some of my own styles on top of it. But it seems I am making some mistake in the setup. Another option may be to go ahead with Semantic UI CSS package ? ...but according to docs I will not be able to use custom styles with this method.
I am a bit confused here , please help :)
The SUI-React docs comment about not recommending use of Webpack 1 is simply because it's not the latest version of Webpack. Webpack 1 still works fine in general. Also, the current version of Create-React-App (1.0) uses Webpack 2, and if you haven't "ejected" your CRA project, you can easily upgrade the react-scripts dependency to use the latest version.
If you want to build a custom Semantic-UI CSS file, yes, you would install the semantic-ui package, and that will create a semantic folder containing Semantic-UI's LESS source files and build system. From there, you would make any edits to SUI's source for your customization. Once you've made your edits, run gulp build inside that semantic folder, and it will create a semantic/dist folder containing the compiled CSS files (per the instructions at https://semantic-ui.com/introduction/build-tools.html ). Finally, you would copy the generated CSS files into your project, probably inside the src folder, and import those in your JS source.
If you don't care about generating a customized Semantic-UI CSS build, you can npm install --save semantic-ui-css, which has a pre-built version of the default Semantic-UI theme, and import the CSS from there.
For what it's worth, my own "Practical Redux" tutorial series uses Semantic-UI-React and the semantic-ui-css package, and I show how to add semantic-ui-css in Practical Redux, Part 4: UI Layout and Project Structure. (I've also used a custom Semantic-UI CSS build in my "real" project at work.)

Configuration for create-react-app after ejecting to build a component library

I started to build a component library that I want to publish on NPM (and reuse in other apps) by creating a React app using create-react-app. Unfortunately the create-react-app default configuration doesn't seem to support building such component libraries (see these issues). So it seems I have to eject.
Do you have some instructions what to configure after ejecting to make this a component library I can reuse in other apps (I guess some Webpack stuff)?
Re-framing my comments into an answer.
Don't eject! CRA hides a lot of stuff under the hood and ejecting throws it up. It's relatively easier to just clone your src into another project with the tooling setup done.
And it's not very difficult to setup one yourself! Here's the things you will need to do:
Basic babel and webpack configuration so your code compiles.
Make sure React and React-DOM are added as external dependencies in your package.json file and added as alias in your webpack.config.js. (A thorough discussion is here.) This is important to ensure you ship the smallest bundles only. Also, React doesn't play well with multiple copies.
Optionally, do the same for any other heavier libraries, e.g. Material-UI, Bootstrap, Lodash etc.
In webpack's configuration, decide how you want your library exports should be? You should be good with UMD.
Add main (and optionally module) entries in your package.json to let npm imports know where the components should be imported from.
Publish it.
Done!
Or, you can simply clone one of these super thin component projects and put in your components there -
https://github.com/wangzuo/react-progress-label
https://github.com/aaronshaf/react-toggle
There are more complete starter-kits as well, but IMO it's important to first know the details yourself before you abstract them away. Once you are familiar with the process, you should try leveraging the kits too as they go much beyond the basics, like test integration, react-storybook support and great npm publishing support.
UPDATES:
The purpose of CRA is to allow quick experimentation and on-boarding to React development, without going through the (somewhat complicated to a beginner) tooling setup. The intended use case of CRA, as denoted by the "App" in the name, is the whole app, not a component. Although developing anything built on language features like ES6 takes some tooling, an app typically takes more setup than a component. E.g. you also need a server component which hosts the generated code. CRA does all this and more for you.
And if you are working on an app, you will eject when you want to take control of the server side of it. It adds value in that case as you will get the basic hosting code auto-generated by CRA during eject.
To address test needs, CRA also has Jest integration, which is a test runner having React specific features like snapshot testing. Again, setting it up manually with your build pipeline is a handful and CRA once again hides all of this complexity from you, so you can simply focus on writing the tests.
This is super simple - you don't actually need webpack if you want to publish a package. Don't install it just for that if you don't want to.
If you use ES6:
You can use a simple script to create a dist folder that babel will create the files after transpiling:
"scripts": {
// other scripts
// .. might want to change "rm -rf" below if you're on a PC
"build:production": "rm -rf es && cross-env NODE_ENV=production node_modules/.bin/babel ./src -d es"
},
What this does is:
Remove the es folder, which is a build folder.
Runs babel for your files (in case they are located in src folder, change it to wherever your files reside) and create the es folder with the transpiled files.
In order to use the script above you need to install the following dependencies:
babel-cli / babel-core / babel-preset-es2015 / cross-env
Make sure you have a .babelrc file so that babel will work:
{
"presets": [
["es2015", { "modules": false }]
]
}
Now all you have to do (after running npm run build:production) is to run:
npm publish
And your library is published in npm. This is also the command you run if you want to update, just don't forget to update the version number in your package.json.
In case you have files you dont want published to npm, just have a file in your root called .npmignore (similar to .gitignore) and list everything you want excluded.
If you don't use ES6:
In this case you don't need to transpile anything, just go straight to the npm publish section above and run it on the root folder you want published.
create-react-app is meant for quick setting up and development of apps, not really for development of libraries. For one thing, create-react-app creates an index.html file when building, which is usually not needed by libraries. Libraries require a different set of configuration (much less).
I faced this problem myself and have written a React component boilerplate for writing and publishing React components: https://github.com/yangshun/react-component-starter, after referencing how popular ES6 libraries were written, such as Redux.
Pros:
Similar to create-react-app, batteries are included
It has got all the important areas covered: development, linting, testing, and distributing
Minimal configuration
Babel for transpilation to ES5 and CommonJS format
ESLint included and configured
Jest tests examples
Webpack configuration that compiles to UMD
React Storybook for quick development of the components
Support for stylesheet distribution alongside your component
Cons:
Highly opinionated in terms of choice of tooling; they follow the choices set by create-react-app.
Have to manually update each package dependencies in future (you'll face this issue if you did eject anyways)
There is minimal configuration included and setup is easy. The various webpack, Babel and ESLint configurations should be quite understandable.
Hope this will be helpful to you. Feel free to give suggestions and comments on how it can be improved.

Resources