enhanced-electron-react-boilerplate

Modern and Minimal Electron + React Starter Kit

Electron, React, Webpack -- Modern and up-to-date, with a handful of quality of life features included

I made this starter kit as most boilerplates were either out-of-date, heavy handed, or enforced a structure on me that I just didn't like. This project utilizes Redux and uses the "ducks" proposal as the basis for the layout and structure of the application views. CSS files are treated as globals, with any less files being compiled as a css module. The goal is to provide a ready to use, easy to adopt boilerplate and starter kit to get rolling with a modern environment, without too much of a "personal" twist on things.

Production builds babel-minify is used, and ES2015/ES6 transpilation is provided -- As modern node and chromium versions support 99%+ of the ES6 feature set, I feel those steps are unnecessary.

If you like this project (or think its too heavy handed and want something more minimal), check out basic-electron-react-boilerplate which is a cut down version of this project without any decisions made on what you should be using or how to structure your application. Its the bare minimum to get up and running with electron+react+webpack.

Main features

• Latest React, Redux, and Webpack 3
• Uses ES6 natively without babel transpilation thanks to modern Electron environments
• Minified with babel-minify
• Uses react-router-dom (React Router v4) with connected-react-router to sync with Redux (uni-directional, use react-router directly)
• LessCSS (easily swapped to Sass if that's more to your liking) using CSS Modules
• Provides a basic component/view structure based on Redux "ducks" proposals, with an included utility helper to make writing your 'views' easier and understandable, with the advantage of minimizing the amount of required files and directory switching
• Embeds PhotonKit for a very basic head start on layouts and styling. Its lightweight and easy to rip out or build on top of.
• You however are encouraged to adapt this as much as you like. If you find you want to rip out too much, bake sure you try basic-electron-react-boilerplate instead.

To get started:

• Run npm install

Development

• Run npm run dev to start webpack-dev-server. Electron will launch automatically after compilation.

Production

You have two options, an automatic build or two manual steps

One Shot

• Run npm run package to have webpack compile your application into dist/bundle.js and dist/index.html, and then an electron-packager run will be triggered for the current platform/arch, outputting to builds/

Manual

Recommendation: Update the "postpackage" script call in package.json to specify parameters as you choose and use the npm run package command instead of running these steps manually

• Run npm run build to have webpack compile and output your bundle to dist/bundle.js
• Then you can call electron-packager directly with any commands you choose

If you want to test the production build (In case you think Babili might be breaking something) after running npm run build you can then call npm run prod. This will cause electron to load off of the dist/ build instead of looking for the webpack-dev-server instance. Electron will launch automatically after compilation.

Scaffold Utility

This project comes with a basic scaffold utility (built on inquirer) to quickly add new components to the application. It lets you create both stateful and stateless components, and you also have the option of spinning up Redux boilerplate to integrate them initially to the redux store with a dummy action that you should swap out immediately. Its written in pure node fs calls to be cross platform.

• Run npm run scaffold
• Fill out the prompts
• Profit! You can always edit the scripts yourself to tweak the templates if you don't like it out of the box