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. Using the Phoenix default of Webpack, this package can make getting React into your application much faster than switching over to a different system.
Note regarding Phoenix versions <= 1.3
Phoenix versions 1.3 and earlier use Brunch by default instead of Webpack for asset compilation. The setup for apps using Brunch is different than apps using Webpack. If you'd like to read the old guide for 1.3/Brunch, you can read the Phoenix 1.3 README.
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.
The package can be installed by adding react_phoenix
to your list of
dependencies in mix.exs
:
def deps do
[
{:react_phoenix, "~> 1.1.0"}
]
end
After adding to your mix file, run:
mix deps.get
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
or
yarn
npm
unfortunately needs an extra bit of configuration to make it happy. Add the following block to your
assets/webpack.config.js
file. If you use yarn
to manage your dependencies, this extra bit of
configuration should not be necessary.
module.exports = (env, options) => ({
...
// ADD THIS BLOCK ˅˅˅
resolve: {
alias: {
react: path.resolve(__dirname, './node_modules/react'),
'react-dom': path.resolve(__dirname, './node_modules/react-dom')
}
}
// ADD THIS BLOCK ^^^
...
});
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.
# using npm
npm install react react-dom --save
npm install @babel/preset-env @babel/preset-react --save-dev
or
# using yarn
yarn add react react-dom
yarn add --dev @babel/preset-env @babel/preset-react
We also need to activate those presets from the assets/.babelrc
file:
// Configure your plugins
{
"presets": [
"@babel/preset-env",
"@babel/preset-react" // <-- ADD THIS!
]
}
In your main application javascript file (usually assets/js/app.js
), add the
following line:
import "react-phoenix"
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",
namespace: MyPhoenixApp
import Phoenix.Controller, only: [get_flash: 1, get_flash: 2, view_module: 1]
use Phoenix.HTML
import MyPhoenixApp.ErrorHelpers
import MyPhoenixApp.Gettext
alias MyPhoenixApp.Router.Helpers, as: Routes
import ReactPhoenix.ClientSide # <-- ADD THIS!
end
end
Once installed, you can use react_component
in your views by:
-
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 }
-
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 thatdiv
(or a different element specified by ID via thetarget_id
option).
I couldn't quite get this working with Brunch, but I hope to have time to look at it again with Webpack.
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