create-react-library
CLI for creating reusable, modern React libraries using Rollup and create-react-app.
Intro
Features
- Easy-to-use CLI
- Handles all modern JS features
- Bundles
commonjs
and es
module formats - create-react-app for example usage and local dev
- Rollup for bundling
- Babel for transpiling
- Jest for testing
- Supports complicated peer-dependencies
- Supports CSS modules
- Optional support for TypeScript
- Sourcemap creation
- Thousands of public modules created
- Thorough documentation :heart_eyes:
- Chinese docs by @monsterooo
Install globally
This package requires node >= 10
.
npm install -g create-react-library
Usage with npx
npx create-react-library
(npx comes with npm 5.2+ and higher, see instructions for older npm versions)
Creating a New Module
create-react-library
Answer some basic prompts about your module, and then the CLI will perform the following steps:
- copy over the template
- install dependencies via yarn or npm
- link packages together for local development
- initialize local git repo
At this point, your new module should resemble this screenshot and is all setup for local development.
Development
Local development is broken into two parts (ideally using two tabs).
First, run rollup to watch your src/
module and automatically recompile it into dist/
whenever you make changes.
npm start
The second part will be running the example/
create-react-app that's linked to the local version of your module.
cd example
npm start
Now, anytime you make a change to your library in src/
or to the example app's example/src
, create-react-app
will live-reload your local dev server so you can iterate on your component in real-time.
Publishing to npm
npm publish
This builds commonjs
and es
versions of your module to dist/
and then publishes your module to npm
.
Make sure that any npm modules you want as peer dependencies are properly marked as peerDependencies
in package.json
. The rollup config will automatically recognize them as peers and not try to bundle them in your module.
Deploying to Github Pages
npm run deploy
This creates a production build of the example create-react-app
that showcases your library and then runs gh-pages
to deploy the resulting bundle.
Use with React Hooks
If you use react-hooks in your project, when you debug your example you may run into an exception Invalid Hook Call Warning. This issue explains the reason, your lib and example use a different instance, one solution is rewrite the react
path in your example's package.json
to 'file:../node_modules/react' or 'link:../node_modules/react'.
Examples
Multiple Named Exports
Here is a branch which demonstrates how to use multiple named exports. The module in this branch exports two components, Foo
and Bar
, and shows how to use them from the example app.
Material-UI
Here is a branch which demonstrates how to make use of a relatively complicated peer dependency, material-ui. It shows the power of rollup-plugin-peer-deps-external which makes it a breeze to create reusable modules that include complicated material-ui subcomponents without having them bundled as a part of your module.
Boilerplate
The CLI is based on this boilerplate, which you can optionally read about here.
Libraries
Here are some example libraries that have been bootstrapped with create-react-library
.
Want to see a more completed list? Check out Made with CRL
Want to add yours to the list? Submit an PR at the Made with CRL repository.
Notice
My open source efforts are now focused on Saasify, and I am not able to invest a significant amount of time into maintaining CRL anymore. I am looking for volunteers who would like to become active maintainers on the project. If you are interested, please shoot me a note.
License
MIT © Travis Fischer
Support my OSS work by following me on twitter