JavaScript
⚡CLI for easily creating reusable react libraries.

create-react-library

CLI for creating reusable, modern React libraries using Rollup and create-react-app.

Intro

Features

• Easy-to-use CLI
• Handles all modern JS features
• Bundles cjs and es module formats
• create-react-app for example usage and local dev
• Rollup for bundling
• Babel for transpiling
• Jest for testing
• Supports complicated peer-dependencies
• Supports CSS modules
• Optional support for TypeScript
• Sourcemap creation
• Hundreds of public modules created
• Thorough documentation 😍
• Chinese docs by @monsterooo

Install

This package requires node >= 4, but we recommend node >= 8.

npm install -g create-react-library

Creating a New Module

create-react-library

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

• copy over the template
• 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 (ideally using two tabs).

First, 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 start # runs create-react-app dev server

Now, anytime you make a change to your library 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.

Publishing to NPM

npm publish

This builds cjs and es versions of your module to dist/ and then publishes your module to npm.

Make sure that any npm modules you want as peer dependencies are properly marked as peerDependencies in package.json. The rollup config will automatically recognize them as peers and not try to bundle them in your module.

Deploying to Github Pages

npm run deploy

This creates a production build of the example create-react-app that showcases your library and then runs gh-pages to deploy the resulting bundle.

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.

Boilerplate

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

Libraries

Here are some example libraries that have been bootstrapped with create-react-library.

• tabler-react - React components and demo for the Tabler UI theme.
• react-background-slideshow - Sexy tiled background slideshow for React 🔥
• react-starfield-animation -Canvas-based starfield animation for React ✨
• react-particle-effect-button - Bursting particle effect buttons for React 🎉
• react-particle-animation - Canvas-based particle animation for React 🌐
• react-block-image - React replacement for img with more control + fallback support 🌃
• react-mp3-recorder - Microphone recorder for React that captures mp3 audio 🎵
• react-before-after-slider - A sexy image comparison slider for React.
• worldwind-react-globe - NASA WorldWind globe component for React.
• react-shimmer - Shimmer effect for loading images.
• react-login-modal-sm - Customizable React social media login modal.
• react-gradient-scroll-indicator - Wrapper for scrollable content with gradients.
• ... and hundreds more!

Want to add yours to the list? Submit an issue.

License

MIT © Travis Fischer