A complex example of how to do server-side rendering with React

by React

react-server-example-tsx

A complex example of how to do server-side rendering with React and TypeScript so that component code can be shared between server and browser (also known as isomorphic javascript).

Server-Side Rendering (SSR) leads to fast initial page loads, search-engine-friendly pages, and of course...its all type safe!

Boilerplate for isomorphic web app with React server-side rendering in TypeScript.

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Getting Started

Clone the repo, change directory, install dependencies, build the code, and run it!

git clone https://github.com/styfle/react-server-example-tsx.git
cd react-server-example-tsx
npm install
npm run build
npm run test
npm start

Then navigate to http://localhost:3007 and click on the buttons to see some reactive events in action.

Deployment

Don't forget to set the environment variable NODE_ENV=production to avoid the slower, dev version of React. Like so:

npx now -e NODE_ENV=production styfle/react-server-example-tsx

Preventing XSS

The original code from mhart attempts to sanitize the props by escaping and then inserting into a script tag.

I avoided this by performing 1 extra http request to fetch the props as json before initializing React in the browser. This means that click handlers will not be initialized until the data is returned and React can pick up where it left off after the server-side render and attach the click even handlers. This is the purpose of ReactDOM.hydrate.

See browser.tsx for the client-side code.

See server.tsx for the server-side code.

Prior art

Based on prior work found at mhart/react-server-example. It's very good so you should check it out :)

Additionally, I use a combination between TypeScript Handbook and awesome-typescript-loader when I switched from browserify v1.4.x to webpack v2.0.x (now webpack v3.x).

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