red-lotus

A tiny engine of file and template generation implemented by react-renderer for Node.js.

This project is inspired by a tweet of Dan Abramov.

Motivation

Today, the normal way to create a file and fill some text into it is directly call the node API like fs.writeFileSync. At most time it's ok, but for a complex (node)library especially for a scaffold, it's hard and annoying to create and concat the file content. That's why we often use a template engine to do this. And then we have to maintain a lot of template engine logic/syntax(condition, iteration, ...) and constant variables like {{ NAMESPACE_FOO_OPTION_BAR }} in that file.

If so, how we maintain those variables/logic? And how we communicate them with all kinds of upstream/libs?

That bothers me, so I create red-lotus.

Installation

npm i red-lotus red-lotus-cli

Usage

Use it out of box

// index.js

const path = require('path');
const React = require('react');
const RedLotus = require('red-lotus');

const { File, Content } = RedLotus

function HelloFile(props) {
  const { platform } = props;

  return (
    React.createElement(
      File,
      { path: 'hello.js' },
      React.createElement(
        Content,
        null,
        `console.log('${ platform === 'node' ? 'Hello Node!' : 'Hello React!' }');`
      )
    )
  );
}

const rootContainer = path.resolve(__dirname, 'this-is-the-generation-result-root-path');

RedLotus.render(React.createElement(HelloFile, { platform: 'node' }), rootContainer);

The result will be:

root
   |-- this-is-the-generation-result-root-path
   |   |-- hello.js

// hello.js

console.log('Hello Node!');

After run node ./index.js, you will see that there will be a directory named this-is-the-generation-result-root-path which has a hello.js file in it. And the content of hello.js is console.log('Hello Node!');.

Use ES Module and JSX by red-lotus-cli

The above example don't use JSX and ES Module because Node doesn't support them natively at now.

But of course you can write ES Module and JSX and then compile it to the syntax supported by Node by using a tool like Babel.

Also, you can use red-lotus-cli which helps you do that.

All you need to do is write a red-lotus.config.js in your root path:

// red-lotus.config.js

const path = require('path');

module.exports = {
  entry: path.resolve(__dirname, './src/index.js'),
};

And then run npx redlotus start or add "wooo": "redlotus start" into the scripts field of your package.json and then run npm run wooo.

It will works same as the above example.

You can find a whole example here.

Supported Environments

• Node.js 10+
• Chrome (WIP)

How it works

TBD

Contributing

TBD