Universal rendering for react app based on create-react-app - reactjs

I have an app based on the create-react-app starter kit and need to switch to universal/server rendering due to SEO issues.
Is there an easy way or example of taking the create-react-app teamplate and adding or modifying it to support universal rendering?
A lot of the examples I see for universal are overly complex for my needs and I prefer to keep it very clean and simple, if possible.
Thanks.
EDIT: FYI,
I found this medium post which points at this repository.
Seems simple enough, but since I'm a newbie on all webpack/react/node related stuff, if anyone thinks it's the wrong approach, would love to know...

There was a proof of concept of adding server rendering in this PR.
I can’t speak to how good it is but it’s something you could start with.
You may also look at some of the alternatives.
A few of them provide server rendering out of the box.

I've just created react universal (server-side rendering) starter used recommendations from redux and react-router v4. Fill free for feedback
https://github.com/gzoreslav/react-redux-saga-universal-application

You can take your app (bootstrapped with Create React App) to the next level by replacing react-scripts with a slightly altered version - react-app-tools, which allows adding server-side code to your project (e.g. for server-side rendering purposes and/or implementing an API endpoint). It will allow compiling and running your app using normal Create React App pipeline, using a single instance of Webpack, on the same HTTP port.
You can find more info by visiting React App SDK.

Related

Can you use Next.js with a React Native App?

I have recently been learning Next.js for React and I like the routing system a lot more than react navigation. Now I am about to start a react native frontend and I was wondering if you can utilise Next.js's routing system in react native as well as it's other benefits. I know that you can use it with expo but I am a little confused as to how it all works and I am starting to wonder if the Next only works on the web side of things..
Does anyone have any experience with this? Any information would be much appreciated.
Thanks!
Unfortunately you can't do such thing, due to the fact that the views of react native are Equivalent to native views in Java or Objective C. When you get build version of react native , you are receiving Java or Objective C native views thank to react native's RN bridge. Meanwhile, when you get build version of your Next.js project, you are going to receive HTML, CSS, JS and these codes are not familiar to native platforms.
However, you can use your Next.js backend as your endpoints and fetch data in react native via calling this endpoints.
UPDATE Oct_2022:
there seem to be a new tool created for this purpose , called solito. I haven't used it personally but it might meet your needs.
UPDATE Jan_2023:
It looks like there are more Tools being created for Both web and native platforms , check react-native-web
You can check out Tauri. With that you can create from Next.js, React, Svelte etc. cross-platform native Apps. Currently, Windows, Mac and Linux are supported stable. Android & iOS is currently in Alpha
The magic behind Tauri is, that they provide around your Frontend library/framework a Rust layer with that you can interact with platform native APIs. They call it Commands.
You can find the guide for Next.js here.
Also, if it's not exactly answering the question - "Is it possible to use Next.js in React native?" - I hope that it's helping everyone who is searching for a solution to use Next.js as Cross-Platform Frontend Framework
I read a thread on ycombinator on this where Solito was mentioned and tried it out. In the comments I found this, which suited my needs best :
https://github.com/mlynch/nextjs-tailwind-ionic-capacitor-starter
Solito looks nice but the all in one repo was using Expo, which I did not like because it installs an extra app. I would check it out for yourself and look at the repo above too, which is using Capacitor and is aimed at having one codebase for the two apps.
Both examples worked well. For Tauri I could not find the mobile support so I didn't try it. I would be interested to read more about people's experience with running a minimum stack for cross platform development.
Note : Solito uses React Native, the repo uses Capacitor instead, which may also suite your needs because it works on both iOS and Android.
There's a lot of support now for this tech stack. Besides solito, which is already mentioned, there is also https://tamagui.dev/ which tries to solve all the issues with react-native-web and Next.js along with Solito.
While they currently recommend a monorepo (which adds a lot of complexity in my opinion), I'm playing around with a vanilla React Native + Next.js here: https://github.com/criszz77/luna
This command should get you started to play around:
npx react-native init MyAppName --template #criszz77/luna

Reactjs wordpress prerender existing client side application for SEO

I am using React in my project and I have problem with client-side prerendering.
More specifically, it would be necessary to configure SEO
Which is the least painless way to prerender existing reactjs app wiht react-routes
Some examples I have researched:
Gatsby.js - https://www.gatsbyjs.org/docs/porting-from-create-react-app-to-gatsby/
Next.js - https://nextjs.org/docs#custom-document
Netlify - https://dev.to/joelvarty/prerender-your-spa-using-netlify-for-better-seo-3h87
React-snap - https://web.dev/prerender-with-react-snap/
Prerender.io - https://prerender.io/
Keen’s Server Side Rendered - https://medium.com/keen-studio/keens-server-side-rendered-react-wordpress-rest-api-boilerplate-bb58edb7cc0a
Razzle - https://reactresources.com/topics/razzle
React Helmet - https://github.com/nfl/react-helmet
Can anyone suggest what option I should choose that is the least painless.
I have headless wordpress as backend and reactjs client-side as frontend.
Or are there other faster options besides the prerendering?
Thanks.
IMO you really don't need to use a framework to achieve SSR if you want to keep control without turning your codebase into a blackbox and choose your own stack.
I created some boilerplate using Node Express. It supports:
SSR using StaticRouter on the server and BrowserRouter in the client
ES6 webpack transpilation + hot reloading both client and server and auto-updating browser
Redux, data preloading and client store hydration
https://github.com/kimgysen/isomorphic-react-setup
Last time I ran it, I noticed that I hadn't saved the favIcon in the public folder and perhaps there are some minor bugs that I will fix soon (I've fixed them in my projects but didn't update this repo because nobody looks at it anyway (lol!)), but what happens here isn't all that difficult to understand.
I created some basic SSR websites with it in a matter of hours.
I enjoy redux-observable to initiate server ajax calls before rendering the content (using forkJoin), but this is not included in the boilerplate (I haven't actually supported it since I uploaded the first time).
But in terms of setup, I don't really see a point in using a framework for this necessarily, it really isn't that painful / difficult to do yourself.
The benefit that I particularly like is that you don't depend yourself on the scope and dependencies of the framework. You don't get into trouble with things like 'the framework will support this feature or fix that bug in one of the upcoming releases'.
Although ultimately, it comes down to personal choice. So it's not like I want to downgrade these frameworks.
Note: The way Redux achieves pre-rendering is simply by adding Redux store (state) objects to the window object in the html that is sent back to the client.
Then at the client, the it initializes the stores with these objects.
So very simply, this is something that is easy to achieve, even if you decide not to implement any other SSR features.
to create server side applicantion with painless integration you can use my cli to generate a default configuration like create react app cli from facebook, https://github.com/ghondar/crassa

Does React use server-side-rendering or client-side-rendering?

In an article I read that
React uses server-side rendering.
But in another articles I came across this:
Client-Side-Rendering is a relatively new approach to rendering
websites, and it didn't really become popular until JavaScript
libraries started incorporating it into their style of development.
Some notable examples are Vue.js and React.js
Now Which statement is correct?
When I use create-react-app and run npm start, it seems to me that React uses the Client-Side-Rendering. isn't it?
It’s client side. But React, like some other client side libraries, can be used on the server to prerender it with node, usually for SEO.
Out of the box it renders on the client side.
But, if you have a requirement to render pages on a server, you can achieve this with:
Next.js or
Hypernova or any other tool (there is a bunch of them nowadays!)
Note, that SSR will require a bit more experience than a regular React app.
The main goal of this approach is to allow search engine robots crawl information form web pages(SEO).
create-react-app uses client side rendering by default. There are some tools like next js and gatsby js which pre-render pages on the server side. You can also do Server Side Rendering from scratch.
A few years on from the last answer, it is now quite difficult to implement a client-only React app - serving it on Node is trivial and absolutely what it expects, trying to use it as a client library with other server-side support is more of a challenge and documentation about how to do this is patchy and much of it out of date.

Does it make sense to use key-mirror in react native project?

Key mirror is a simple package which is used to create an object with values equal to its key names. It is first used in facebook react project.
From a comment here, it seems to me that this package only makes sense when being applied to react web project, as it can survive google closure advanced mode to make web load faster. I am wondering if anyone use it in a react native project, as I tend to think there's no point using it in app development.
thanks :)

React / Relay server side rendering and SEO friendly application

What is the most reliable way/approach to build React/Relay/GraphQL SEO friendly application with server side rendering ?
Some time ago I wrote isomorphic-relay and isomorphic-relay-router to solve exactly that problem. And I still support and update them, as they are still very actual. Personally I use these libraries in my projects, and other people also use them in production.
I would checkout Next.js together with relay-nextjs package.
Next.js solves SSR,the relay-nextjs package as a glue for Relay.
Also, I recommend check on this medium.com article

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