Building Static Sites without React - Using React (Part 1/3)
React is good and we love using it but we just don't want it inside our compiled HTML, CSS, and Javascript.
It's 2020 and people are talking more and more about static site generations with UI frameworks such as React. We have a lot of decent libraries, if not frameworks, such as Gatsby, NextJS, react-static, etc.
So, why do we talk about another method for static site generation instead of using these existing amazing tools?
Well, in the foundation, all those create static HTML, CSS, and Javascript files for you but they include the footprints of React within them. That is not a bad thing at all, in fact, that's the best thing ever happened. You get the runtime of React and the benefit of virtual DOM follows. However, imagine when we are required to create just plain old HTML files with some UI logic implemented in the client-side script. We can use lots of template engines out there, but why not React?
The Overview
Since React introduced renderStaticMarkup, many use it to do server-side rendering for plain HTML and that's neat. We'll use it to generate the pre-rendered content. We'll then extract CSS and related Javascript files. Finally, we put the pre-rendered content into the HTML template with the correct script and stylesheet tags populated and output the files.
The Setup
Let's start off with our package.json file
{
"name": "react-no-react",
"version": "1.0.0",
"main": "index.js",
"license": "MIT",
"dependencies": {
"react": "^16.9.0",
"react-dom": "^16.9.0"
},
"devDependencies": {
"@babel/cli": "^7.8.4",
"@babel/core": "^7.10.4",
"@babel/node": "^7.10.4",
"@babel/preset-env": "^7.9.5",
"@babel/preset-react": "^7.9.4",
"glob": "^7.1.6"
}
}
As you can see, we need React, ReactDOM, and Babel. Babel is for transpiling the client-side Javascript we might write in ES6. We'll also use babel-node as our CLI tool. Let's create our project structure.
.
├── pages
│ ├── AboutUs.jsx
│ └── Home.jsx
├── scripts
│ └── build.js
├── babel.config.js
└── package.json
In babel.config.js we create our configuration like this
module.exports = {
presets: ["@babel/env", "@babel/react"],
};
Then, in our scripts/build.js.
import React from "react";
import path from "path";
import fs from "fs";
import glob from "glob";
import { renderToStaticMarkup } from "react-dom/server";
import { spawnSync } from "child_process";
const cwd = path.resolve(__dirname, "..");
// We glob all the files under "pages" directory
const reactFiles = glob.sync("pages/**/*.jsx", { cwd });
reactFiles.forEach((reactFile) => {
const fileName = path.basename(reactFile).replace(".jsx", "");
// Page components are from "default" export
const Component = require(path.resolve(__dirname, "../", reactFile)).default;
const staticMarkup = renderToStaticMarkup(<Component />);
// Generate HTML file name from ".jsx" files by replacing the extension with ".html"
const htmlFile = path.resolve(
__dirname,
"../dist/",
reactFile.replace(".jsx", ".html")
);
const dirName = path.dirname(htmlFile);
// In case we have nested page structure, we need to create directory recursively.
fs.mkdirSync(dirName, { recursive: true });
fs.writeFileSync(
htmlFile,
`<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<meta charset="UTF-8">
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">
<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="ie=edge">
<title>${fileName}</title>
</head>
<body>
${staticMarkup}
</body>
</html>`,
"utf8"
);
});
Let's create our pages
// pages/Home.jsx
import React from "react";
export default () => <h1>Home Page</h1>;
``` ```javascript
// pages/AboutUs.jsx
import React from "react";
export default () => <h1>About Us</h1>;
Finally, create a build script inside package.json
...
"scripts": {
"build": "babel-node scripts/build.js"
},
...
Run the script
npm run build
or
yarn build
Then you should see two new files.
.
├── dist
│ ├── AboutUs.html
│ └── Home.html
...
But those are just plain HTML. What about CSS, JS, and static assets? That is the topic we'll be discussing in the next part. So if you're interested, stay tuned.Read on: Building Static Sites without React - Using React (Part 2/3)
