Documentación en español aquí

A simple demo showing how one can render a ReactJS application server-side (in NodeJS), without losing reactivity on the client. It was entirely inspired by this article published by Charlie Marsh (August 2014), as well as the valuable resources he recommends at the end, so if you need to know more about what this is all about, read it!

This is a simple demo, don't use it in production.

• Install dependencies $ npm install
• Start the server $ npm start
• Have fun with that amazing button at localhost:3000
• Explore the code

• On the server you can transparently require() JSX code thanks to node-jsx.
• React components are required(), compiled and rendered in a per-request basis. You can edit the .jsx files and the server will always send a fresh updated html markup to the client in every request, without having to restart the server, much like you would with most templating systems such as jade or ejs.
• The browser receives the whole application code (including react) in a unique bundle thanks to connect-browserify This file is also re-bundled automatically whenever a change is made to the app code.

Note: This demo uses some dirty hacks only suitable for development stage and really bad for production, in such a case:

• Don't use node-jsx, use react-tools to compile all your JSX code to JS before require() it.
• Don't use connect-browserify to generate the bundle.js on the server, instead use Grunt or Gulp to compile, minify and compress everything in a previous step, serve the bundle as a simple static file.
• On the server you should render the HTML markup just once at server startup, and NOT in every request.

0.0.3 / 2014-09-03

• add a middleware to clear .jsx files from require cache in every request
• add watch: true option to connect-browserify to re-bundle when editing
• update documentation

See History.md for a complete list of changes.