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hapijs-react-views

0.8.0 • Public • Published

hapijs-react-views

This is an Hapijs view engine which renders React components asynchronously on the server. It renders static markup and does not support mounting those views on the client.

This is intended to be used as a replacement for existing server-side view solutions, like jade, ejs, or handlebars.

A port of express-react-views to hapi

Usage

npm i hapijs-react-views react -S

Note: You must explicitly install react as a dependency. Starting in v0.5, react is a peer dependency here. This is to avoid issues that may come when using incompatible versions.

Add it to your app.

// app.js
const hapi = require('hapi');
server = new hapi.Server();
const engine = require('hapijs-react-views')();
 
server.views({
    defaultExtension: 'jsx',
    engines: {
        jsx: engine, // support for .jsx files
        js: engine // support for .js
    }
});

Options

Beginning with v0.2, you can now pass options in when creating your engine.

option values default
jsx.harmony true: enable a subset of ES6 features false
jsx.stripTypes true: strip Flow type annotations false
jsx.extension any file extension with leading . ".jsx"
doctype any string that can be used as a doctype, this will be prepended to your document "<!DOCTYPE html>"
caching false: disable JSX from being cached and regenerate on every call true
beautify true: beautify markup before outputting (note, this can affect rendering due to additional whitespace) false

The defaults are sane, but just in case you want to change something, here's how it would look:

const options = { jsx: { harmony: true } };
server.views({
    defaultExtension: 'jsx',
    engines: {
        jsx: require('hapijs-react-views')(options), // support for .jsx files
        js: require('hapijs-react-views')(options) // support for .js
    }
});

Views

Your views should be node modules that export a React component. Let's assume you have this file in views/index.jsx:

const React = require('react');
 
class HelloMessage extends React.Component {
  render() {
    return <div>Hello {this.props.name}</div>;
  }
}
 
module.exports = HelloMessage;

Routes

Your routes would look identical to the default routes Express gives you out of the box.

// app.js
server.route({
    method: 'GET',
    path: '/',
    config: {
        handler: require('./routes').index
    }
});
// routes/index.js
 
exports.index = function(request, reply){
  reply.view('index', { name: 'John' });
};

That's it! Layouts follow really naturally from the idea of composition.

Layouts

Simply pass the relevant props to a layout component.

views/layouts/default.jsx:

const React = require('react');
 
class DefaultLayout extends React.Component {
  render() {
    return (
      <html>
        <head><title>{this.props.title}</title></head>
        <body>{this.props.children}</body>
      </html>
    );
  }
}
 
module.exports = DefaultLayout;

views/index.jsx:

const React = require('react');
const DefaultLayout = require('./layouts/default');
 
class HelloMessage extends React.Component {
  render() {
    return (
      <DefaultLayout title={this.props.title}>
        <div>Hello {this.props.name}</div>
      </DefaultLayout>
    );
  }
}
 
module.exports = HelloMessage;

Questions

What about partials & includes?

These ideas don't really apply. But since they are familiar ideas to people coming from more traditional "templating" solutions, let's address it. Most of these can be solved by packaging up another component that encapsulates that piece of functionality.

What about view helpers?

I know you're used to registering helpers with your view helper (hbs.registerHelper('something', ...))) and operating on strings. But you don't need to do that here.

  • Many helpers can be turned into components. Then you can just require and use them in your view.
  • You have access to everything else in JS. If you want to do some date formatting, you can require('moment') and use directly in your view. You can bundle up other helpers as you please.

Where does my data come from?

All "locals" are exposed to your view in this.props. These should work identically to other view engines, with the exception of how they are exposed. Using this.props follows the pattern of passing data into a React component, which is why we do it that way. Remember, as with other engines, rendering is synchronous. If you have database access or other async operations, they should be done in your routes.

Caveats

  • I'm saying it again to avoid confusion: this does not do anything with React in the browser. This is only a solution for server-side rendering.
  • This currently uses require to access your views. This means that contents are cached for the lifetime of the server process. You need to restart your server when making changes to your views. In development, we clear your view files from the cache so you can simply refresh your browser to see changes.
  • React & JSX have their own rendering caveats. For example, inline <script>s and <style>s will need to use dangerouslySetInnerHTML={{__html: 'script content'}}. You can take advantage of ES6 template strings here.
<script dangerouslySetInnerHTML={{__html: `
  // google analtyics
  // is a common use
`}} />
  • It's not possible to specify a doctype in JSX. You can override the default HTML5 doctype in the options.

Dependencies (4)

Dev Dependencies (0)

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    Install

    npm i hapijs-react-views

    Repository

    github.com/Icehunter/hapijs-react-views

    Homepage

    github.com/Icehunter/hapijs-react-views

    Weekly Downloads

    1

    Version

    0.8.0

    License

    BSD-3-Clause

    Last publish

    Collaborators

    • icehunter
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