react-modern-library-cli

CLI for easily publishing modern React modules with Rollup and example usage via create-react-app.

Intro

The purpose of this CLI is to make publishing your own React components as simple as possible.

The CLI is based on this boilerplate, which you can optionally read in-depth about here.

Features

Support all modern JS language features for component development out of the box
Build process to convert source to umd and es module formats for publishing to npm
Comes with an example app using a standard create-react-app, serving 2 purposes
- Local, hot-reload server for developing your module
- Easily publishable to github pages so users can quickly play with your module
Use Rollup for build process and Babel for transpilation
- See the blog post for an explanation of Rollup vs Webpack
Allow the use of npm modules within your library, either as dependencies or peer-dependencies
Support importing CSS in your components (with css modules enabled by default)
- Note that CSS support will be a noop if you're using css-in-js
Testing with Jest, using react-scripts from create-react-app
Sourcemap creation enabled by default
Thorough documentation written by someone who cares 😍

Install

npm install -g react-modern-library-cli

Creating a New Module

react-modern-library-cli

Answer some basic prompts about your module, and then the CLI will perform the following steps:

copy over the template to a new folder in the current directory
install dependencies via yarn or npm
link packages together for local development
initialize local git repo

At this point, your new module should resemble this screenshot and is all setup for local development.

Development

Local development is broken into two parts.

First, you'll run rollup to watch your src/ module and automatically recompile it into dist/ whenever you make changes.

npm start # runs rollup with watch flag

The second part will be running the example/ create-react-app that's linked to the local version of your module.

# (in another tab) 
cd example
npm link <your-module-name> # optional if using yarn 
npm start # runs create-react-app dev server

Now, anytime you make a change to your component in src/ or to the example app's example/src, create-react-app will live-reload your local dev server so you can iterate on your component in real-time.

Note: if you're using yarn, there is no need to use yarn link, as the generated module's example includes a local-link by default.

NPM Stuffs

The only difference when publishing your component to npm is to make sure you add any npm modules you want as peer dependencies are properly marked as peerDependencies in package.json. The rollup config will automatically recognize them as peer dependencies and not try to bundle them in your module.

Then publish as per usual.

# note this will build `commonjs` and `es`versions of your module to dist/ 
npm publish

Github Pages

Deploying the example to github pages is simple. We create a production build of our example create-react-app that showcases your library and then run gh-pages to deploy the resulting bundle. This can be done as follows:

npm run deploy

Examples

Multiple Named Exports

Here is a branch which demonstrates how to use multiple named exports. The module in this branch exports two components, Foo and Bar, and shows how to use them from the example app.

Material-UI

Here is a branch which demonstrates how to make use of a relatively complicated peer dependency, material-ui. It shows the power of rollup-plugin-peer-deps-external which makes it a breeze to create reusable modules that include complicated material-ui subcomponents without having them bundled as a part of your module.