react-stdio

react-stdio

react-stdio lets you render React components on the server, regardless of the backend technology you're using.

As its name suggests, other processes communicate with react-stdio using standard streams. The protocol is JSON, so any environment that can spawn a child process and write JSON to its stdin can use the server. Requests are handled serially, so responses are issued in the same order requests are received.

Installation

Using npm:

$ npm install react-stdio

Usage

Once you've installed the server, you will have a react-stdio binary available (assuming node_modules/.bin is in your $PATH). Execute it to start the server.

To render a React component, write a JSON blob to stdin with any of the following properties:

component       The path to a file that exports a React component (required)
props           Any props you want to pass to the component (optional, default is {})
render          The type of rendering (optional, default is renderToString)

If the request is successful, the server will put a JSON blob with {"html":"..."} on stdout. If the request fails for some reason, the JSON will have an error property instead of html.

Example:

$ echo '{"component":"./MyComponent","props":{"message":"hello"}}' | react-stdio

If you'd like to use a render method other than renderToString or renderToStaticMarkup you can pass a path to a file that exports your rendering function. The signature of your render function should be:

function render(element, callback) {
  // ...
}

This function is asynchronous so you have time to do data fetching before you render if you wish. Call callback(error, html) when you're finished.

Environment

Your component file (and, optionally, your render file) are loaded in a node.js environment with Babel's es2015 and react presets installed. If you need some other code transforms to run first (e.g. webpack or Browserify) you should create your bundle first and tell react-stdio to load your bundle instead of the plain component file.