excluding a library during bundle - reactjs

I am new to npm, react and webpack but I have a question. In npm how do you prevent a library from being included production package file?
For example, I am just building a very small component in react and on the site where I am going to place my small component. The problem is Jquery library and bootstrap is already being called in the masterpage of the site and I didn't want to call the same library again in my small application production build but I still want to use them during development(because I am only testing it on local and jquery is not called there). TIA
Appreciate your time ready this and hope I got to learn more from you. By the way I created the app using create-react-app but I already 'ejected' it, so its using the webpack 3

Take a look at Webpack externals
You can have two webpack configs, on the dev config you include the package as normal, but for your production config add externals for jquery, so it uses the global one already on the page

The ability you're looking for is named Code splitting
React loadable may be a good option for you as well

Related

Should we bundle shared component library separately in lerna monorepo?

I have three packages inside standard lerna monorepo.
client
react library
core
Core - is a shared component library with some utils (may or may not publish on npm).
React library is component library which will be shared on npm.
client is a bundled js library which will be consumed in browser with static html files.
core is a dependency in react-lib as well as client
Question 1 - How to setup core, should I transpile with tsc and bundle with tools such as rollup or vite (i personally prefer vite/rollup over webpack). or just leave it as is and import it in client and react-lib with absolute paths like 'core/src/*"?
Question 2 - can i build core in 'es' format and build client just like normal react app with either cra or vite. I tried this but i think i am missing something as final bundle doesn't seem to work in browser.
Any help would be really appreciated.
You have a few questions and I might not be able to answer them all but hopefully enough to guide you for the solution you're looking for.
Core - is a shared component library with some utils (may or may not publish on npm).
If you want to use Lerna then I guess you'll have to eventually publish the package on npm or a private repository. As an alternative, you could also use pnpm workspaces and their workspace: protocol which will allow you to link the packages in your workspace (monorepo) without ever downloading them from npm, for example if you use workspace:* then it will always use and link to the latest code from your local workspace. You could also use workspace: protocol with Lerna (or Lerna-Lite) since they both support it.
For your next Questions, I'll answer the last part of your Question 1 first because that affects the other portion of the question.
Question 1: ...or just leave it as is and import it in client and react-lib with absolute paths like 'core/src/*'?
Use absolute paths outside of the package is not a good thing to do since it will only work on your local project and you cannot publish that to npm since it will be broken for the other users. It's better to stick with the workspace and let the package use the main or exports entries defined in your package.json. In other words, it's preferable to always build/transpile and let your other package use the transpiled code and if you need to debug then make sure to also include sourcemap
Question 1: How to setup core, should I transpile with tsc and bundle with tools such as rollup or vite (i personally prefer vite/rollup over webpack)
It probably doesn't matter which one you use TypeScript, Rollup or WebPack, In one of my project I use TypeScript in watch mode, it will auto-transpile whenever you change your code, the downside is that the more packages you have then the more TypeScript threads are opened in watch mode (1x per package) but in your case if you only have 3 then it's fine, there's also this TypeScript issue that I'm following which will hopefully bring multi-threaded compilation in the future. You could also use Rollup and the concept would be the same, use it in watch mode for each package (I've done it with Vite/Rollup using vite build --watch
as explained in the next paragraph).
You can take a look at a project I've done Vue 3 and pnpm workspace using pnpm workspace with the workspace: protocol, it uses Rollup for transpiling and also uses Vite library mode which allows to bundle your library for distribution (on npm or others...), this allows you to bundle each package as a lib that is easily reusable by other projects. It's a Vue 3 project, so it's not a React project but it should give you enough ideas on how to do in React and it should help to answer your Question 2. Also that project is not using Lerna/Lerna-Lite but since it uses the workspace: protocol then it would be super easy to add Lerna on top of it in the future (basically just adding the lerna.json config should be enough)

Create react project without internet

So similar questions have been asked, but I have additional questions that I'm needing answered. It's also quite possible I'm overthinking all of this.
To create a react project offline, I should be able to get the minified react library from a CDN. But without internet access, I need to save out that javascript to a different file, right? Then I can transfer that to my offline machine.
From there, how does running the project work? Can I use command line tools for react? Do I lose the react debugging capabilities? Or am I just writing React code and then loading the index.html into the browser?
How does node_modules work? I know the amount of modules react installs when using create-react-app is a lot. Is all of that self-contained in the CDN?
Do I need to get Babel for transpiling? or is that also included in the CDN?
Thanks in advance.
EDIT:
It seems that using node_modules is going to be out of the question for my use case. So I'll need to use the CDN scripts. What do I lose when using React this way? I'm assuming I can't run from the command-line, so I'm only able to load the index.html into the browser. Same question as before though, do I need Babel for transpiling? What other capabilities that I'm used to having with React to I lose when only using the CDN script?

Does a React application HAVE to run on its own server process?

I come from a background in Angular, but I wanted to start learning React. I want to make a React front-end for a nodejs Express web service.
In Angular, I could simply build the source code into a static folder with a standard index.html, and it can be deployed on any web server. With React however, every tutorial I see is about running React in its own server using create-react-app and npm start.
I know you can also just use script tags to import the React framework in a static page, but then you can't use JSX syntax, and I would like to. Is it possible to simply build a React project into a static folder with an index.html that can be deployed on any web server?
Yep, you can do what you're describing. If you want to use JSX syntax, you'll need Babel, which transpiles it into standard JavaScript.
You can avoid the complexities of setting it up by using create-react-app to create the app, then running npm build instead of npm start. This will compile everything into a build directory, complete with index.html.
CRA uses its server for development purposes. You don't need CRA for using React of course. But, as your app getting bigger and bigger you will need some more extra tools. For example you want to see your code instantly without refreshing your browser. Here comes the dev server and hot reloading.
CRA uses Webpack behind the scenes. It is a great tool for bundling (obviously) all your files (including css), minifying, uglifying, optimizing your code etc.
For simple code or testing purposes using one file and attaching React and Babel to your file could be enough but for real apps you will need more. Either you will use something like Webpack on your own or you will use CRA and let it do all the extra stuff for you.

Optimizing libraries with web pack

I am attempting to publish a small library of react UI components. These components have dependencies: Matarial UI, React Rotuer, etc;
When I build my code I get a warning about exceeding the recommended bundle size. I am at 451Kib. When I analyze my bundle I notice that 96.1% of it is dependencies that have been added to the bundle from node_modules.
Since I am only going to be publishing a handfull of components that are also going to be imported with webpack, is there a way to exclude the dependencies from my bundle and have them packaged in the bundle of any app that uses my components?
I think I need to use code-splitting, or lazy-loading, or something, but I am not sure of the proper way to get started.
Pieces of Advice I can give you:
Use webpack-node-externals to exclude node_modules from bundle. If your code depends on packages that won't be included in the user app - use whitelist to bundle them as well.
Also mark Matarial UI, React Rotuer (and probably react) as peerDependecies in package.json.

Creating a UI component library with react-native for android apps

I want to use my UI components as a reusable seperate repo/project for my react-native iniit App.
So i creatd a seperate project folder like this
and installed these dependencies
and few dependencies externally with my other app.
Then i used
yarn link
to link this project to my working app as a module just like a node module. but i get this error when i try to run my app?
Is there an issue with my method, or is there a sure way i can try to reach my goal because i found multiple ways and various configuration of creating such component libraries.but i didn't use any since the end goal is different.
This is a known issue with the React Native packager. See this discussion: https://github.com/facebook/react-native/issues/637.
This may have to do with using watchman, although there seem to be a few different cases where this can crop up.
TL;DR: React Native packager does not respect symlinks to projects, so npm and yarn link do not work like you would expect them to. Apparently this is being resolved in metro-bundler: https://github.com/facebook/metro-bundler/issues/1.
Unfortunately the workarounds are not that pretty, but there are a few options discussed in the issue 637 discussion. It also looks like you may be using a github repo for your package.
You could tell npm to get your library from github via your project's package.json, so you probably do not need npm link, though you will not be able to link to your local files for your module this way.

Resources