Redux stack

Redux Stack is a library that helps you build modular, structured, and cleaner redux apps.

As the Redux ecosystem grows, libraries integrate by offering their own middleware, or enhancers, or even custom compose and createStore functions. When each library require a different way, or a "non standard" way to integrate with your Redux store, reducers, and middleware, it's inevitable that something will break, or at least for the code base to be rigid and not modular enough to scale.

Redux Stack introduces a concept of initializers. Small pieces of integration code, per library, that "declares" how it integrates. Redux Stack will mesh these together to create your personalized store builder.

Quick Start

Create an initializers folder, and drop an initializer there. An initializer is the main abstraction around Redux Stack, and it's responsibility is to declare, for each integration, how to configure the store. To see how the redux DevTools initializer looks like, for example, check out this file. We'll come back to initializers in a bit.

To create your store, you only need to pull the initializers and configure with redux-stack:

import { createStore, combineReducers } from 'redux'
import { buildStack } from 'redux-stack'
import stack from './initializers'
 
const { reducers, enhancer } = buildStack(stack)
const store = createStore(combineReducers(reducers), {}, enhancer)
 
export default store

Initializers

An initializer in Redux Stack, is a simple Javascript module that exports the following shape:

export default {
  reducers: {}
  enhancers: []
  composers: []
}

The reducers, enhancers (applyMiddleware is one example of an enhancer), and composers fields all contain one or more of the standard redux reducer, enhancer and composer.

To learn how to make your own initializer, take a look at the example initializers in the examples folder, which cover trivial and more complex configuration.

Towards Redux Initializers and Presets

One goal is to have an extensive, pre-made set of initializers as part of redux-stack so people don't need to write them. For every well-known library you'll have a ready-made initializer that takes care of its configuration and integration into your Redux app.

So if you build a new initializer for a redux library, please feel free to submit!

Another goal is to provide presets, which are sets of initializers, or complete stacks for you to use. This idea is inspired from babel presets. So you could even do something like this:

import { createStore, combineReducers } from 'redux'
import { buildStack } from 'redux-stack'
import stack from 'stack-react-native'
 
const { reducers, enhancer } = buildStack(stack)
const store = createStore(combineReducers(reducers), {}, enhancer)
 
export default store

Example Store Setup

Here's how Redux Stack improves the way your code base feels, and supports modularity.

Before

import users from '@/modules/users/state'
import settings from '@/modules/settings/state'
import intro from '@/modules/intro/state'
import { NavigationReducer, createNavigationEnabledStore } from '@exponent/ex-navigation'
import thunk from 'redux-thunk'
import createLogger from 'redux-logger'
import { createStore, applyMiddleware, combineReducers, compose } from 'redux'
import { persistStore, autoRehydrate } from 'redux-persist'
import immutableTransform from 'redux-persist-transform-immutable'
import {AsyncStorage} from 'react-native'
const devtools = window.__REDUX_DEVTOOLS_EXTENSION_COMPOSE__ || compose
 
const reducers = {
  users,
  settings,
  intro,
}
const rootReducer = combineReducers({navigation: NavigationReducer, ...reducers})
 
 
const logger = createLogger({
  collapsed: true,
  // only log in development mode
  predicate: () => __DEV__,
  // transform immutable state to plain objects
  stateTransformer: state => removeNavigation(fromJS(state).toJS()),
  // transform immutable action payloads to plain objects
  actionTransformer: action =>
    action && action.payload && action.payload.toJS
      ? {...action, payload: action.payload.toJS()}
      : action
})
 
let middleware = [
  thunk,
  logger
]
 
const createStoreWithNavigation = createNavigationEnabledStore({
  createStore,
  navigationStateKey: 'navigation',
})
 
const initialState = {}
 
const store = createStoreWithNavigation(
  rootReducer,
  initialState,
  compose(
    autoRehydrate(),
    devtools(
      applyMiddleware(...middleware)
    )
  )
)
 
persistStore(store, {
  storage: AsyncStorage,
  blacklist: ['navigation'],
  transforms: [immutableTransform()]
})
 
export default store

The setup code is convoluted. In addition imports and library usage are separated and out of mind. It also means that if you ever want to change, or remove components you'll have to hunt them out and hope you didn't break your app; we see a lot of importance for how your order your integration.

After

import { createStore, combineReducers } from 'redux'
import { buildStack } from 'redux-stack'
import stack from '@/initializers'
 
const initialState = {}
const { reducers, enhancer } = buildStack(stack)
const store = createStore(combineReducers(reducers), initialState, enhancer)
 
export default store

Where we have a new initializers folder:

initializers/
├── devtools.js
├── ex-navigation.js
├── index.js
├── middleware.js
├── reducers.js
├── redux-logger.js
└── redux-persist.js

The setup code is a no brainer. It is clean and reasonable and probably will look the same for every new app you make, so you can even extract that out into an npm module.

The initializers realm is separate and modular. You can remove and add any initializer you like and be certain nothing will break. If you built your app in a modular fashion, every module can "contribute" an initializer which sets itself app, and no drama happens - no other code to change or module to wreck by mistake.

Contributing

Fork, implement, add tests, pull request, get my everlasting thanks and a respectable place here :).

Thanks:

To all Contributors - you make this happen, thanks!

Copyright

Copyright (c) 2016 Dotan Nahum @jondot. See LICENSE for further details.