README-phoenix-1.3.md

ReactPhoenix for Phoenix < 1.4

Functions to make rendering React.js components easy in Phoenix.

Combined with the javascript also included in this package, rendering React components in your Phoenix views is now much easier. The module was built with Brunch in mind (vs Webpack). Since Phoenix uses Brunch by default, this package can make getting React into your application much faster than switching over to a different system.

Note regarding Phoenix versions < 1.3

This README is written as a guide for Phoenix apps running Phoenix >= 1.3. If you are using a version of Phoenix below version 1.3, you can check out the Phoenix 1.2 README.

Installation in 4 (or 5) EASY STEPS!

This package is meant to be quick and painless to install into your Phoenix application. It is a thin wrapper to call the React render function from your Phoenix template and assumes you already have React in your project.

1. Declare the dependency

The package can be installed by adding react_phoenix to your list of dependencies in mix.exs:

def deps do
  [{:react_phoenix, "~> 0.6.0"}]
end

After adding to your mix file, run:

> mix deps.get

2. Add the javascript dependency to package.json

In order to correctly render a React component in your view templates, a provided javascript file must be included in your assets/package.json file in the dependencies section. It might look like this:

{
  ...
  "dependencies": {
    "phoenix": "file:../deps/phoenix",
    "phoenix_html": "file:../deps/phoenix_html",
    "react": "^16.2.0",
    "react-dom": "^16.2.0",
    "react-phoenix": "file:../deps/react_phoenix" <-- ADD THIS!
  },
  ...
}

Then run (from your assets directory)

> npm install

3. Make sure React and Babel presets are installed

Since we want React and would like to write JSX in our app, we need to make sure we get the packages brunch needs in order to compile our files.

> npm install react babel-preset-env babel-preset-react --save

We also need to activate those presets from our assets/brunch-config.js file:

// ...
// Configure your plugins
plugins: {
  babel: {
    presets: ["env", "react"], // <-- ADD THIS!
    // Do not use ES6 compiler in vendor code
    ignore: [/vendor/]
  }
},
// ...

4. Import and initialize the javascript helper

In your main application javascript file (usually assets/js/app.js), add the following line:

import "react-phoenix"

5. (optional) Import the module into your views for less typing

If you'd like to just call react_component(...) in your views instead of the full ReactPhoenix.ClientSide.react_component(...), you can import ReactPhoenix.ClientSide into your lib/APPNAME_web.ex views section. It might look like this:

def view do
  quote do
    use Phoenix.View, root: "web/templates"

    import Phoenix.Controller, only: [get_csrf_token: 0, get_flash: 2, view_module: 1]

    use Phoenix.HTML

    import MyPhoenixApp.Router.Helpers
    import MyPhoenixApp.ErrorHelpers
    import MyPhoenixApp.Gettext

    import ReactPhoenix.ClientSide # <-- ADD THIS!
  end
end

Usage

Once installed, you can use react_component in your views by:

1. Making sure that the component you'd like rendered is in the global namespace. You can do that in app.js like this (for example):

   import MyComponent from "./components/my_component"
   window.Components = {
     MyComponent
   }

2. In your view template, you can then render it like this:

   # with no props
   <%= ReactPhoenix.ClientSide.react_component("Components.MyComponent") %>
   
   # with props
   <%= ReactPhoenix.ClientSide.react_component("Components.MyComponent", %{language: "elixir", awesome: true}) %>
   
   # with props and a target html element id option
   <span id="my-react-span"><%= @react_html %></span>
   <%= ReactPhoenix.ClientSide.react_component("Components.Characters", %{people: people}, target_id: "my-react-span") %>

   This will render a special div element in your html output that will then be recognized by the javascript helper as a div that should be turned into a React component. It will then render the named component in that div (or a different element specified by ID via the target_id option).

What about server-side rendering?

Server-side rendering is a bit of a bear to get right with brunch. In fact, there was a previous version (0.4.3) of react-phoenix that included an attempt at server-side rendering. It worked locally for me, but only after many attempts to get it right. In the end, there was a specific set of hand-wavy things you needed to do to get it working and I removed all the server-side code from the master branch for now.

I may have some time freed up in the future to attempt to tackle it again. But for the simplicity of installation and usage, client-side rendering is likely all you'll need for now.

Documentation and other stuff

This package is heavily inspired by the react-rails project.

For more detailed documentation, check out the hex docs at https://hexdocs.pm/react_phoenix