FiveM React and Lua Boilerplate

A simple and extendable React (TypeScript) boilerplate designed around the Lua ScRT

This repository is a basic boilerplate for getting started with React in NUI. It contains several helpful utilities and is bootstrapped using create-react-app. It is for both browser and in-game based development workflows.

For in-game workflows, Utilizing craco to override CRA, we can have hot builds that just require a resource restart instead of a full production build

This version of the boilerplate is meant for the CfxLua runtime.

View Demo View Github

Requirements

A basic understanding of the modern web development workflow. If you don't know this yet, React might not be for you just yet.

Getting Started

First clone the repository or use the template option and place it within your resources folder

Installation

The boilerplate was made using yarn but is still compatible with npm.

Install dependencies by navigating to the web folder within a terminal of your choice and type npm i or yarn.

Features

This boilerplate comes with some utilities and examples to work off of.

Lua Utils

SendReactMessage

This is a small wrapper for dispatching NUI messages. This is designed to be used with the useNuiEvent React hook.

Signature

---@param action string The action you wish to target
---@param data any The data you wish to send along with this action
SendReactMessage(action, data)

Usage

SendReactMessage('setVisible', true)

debugPrint

A debug printing utility that is dependent on a convar, if the convar is set this will print out to the console.

The convar is dependent on the name given to the resource. It follows this format YOUR_RESOURCE_NAME-debugMode

To turn on debugMode add +setr YOUR_RESOURCE_NAME-debugMode 1 to your server.cfg or use the setr console command instead.

Signature (Replicates print)

---@param ... any[] The arguments you wish to send
debugPrint(...)

Usage

debugPrint('wow cool string to print', true, someOtherVar)

React Utils

Signatures are not included for these utilities as the type definitions are sufficient enough.

useNuiEvent

This is a custom React hook that is designed to intercept and handle messages dispatched by the game scripts. This is the primary way of creating passive listeners.

Note: For now handlers can only be registered a single time. I haven't come across a personal usecase for a cascading event system

Usage

const MyComp: React.FC = () => {
  const [state, setState] = useState('')
  
  useNuiEvent<string>('myAction', (data) => {
    // the first argument to the handler function
    // is the data argument sent using SendReactMessage
    
    // do whatever logic u want here
    setState(data)
  })
  
  return(
    <div>
      <h1>Some component</h1>
      <p>{state}</p>
    </div>
  )
}

fetchNui

This is a simple NUI focused wrapper around the standard fetch API. This is the main way to accomplish active NUI data fetching or for trigger NUI callbacks in the game scripts.

When using this, you must always at least callback using {} in the gamescripts.

This can be heavily customized to your use case

Usage

// First argument is the callback event name. 
fetchNui<ReturnData>('getClientData').then(retData => {
  console.log('Got return data from client scripts:')
  console.dir(retData)
  setClientData(retData)
}).catch(e => {
  console.error('Setting mock data due to error', e)
  setClientData({ x: 500, y: 300, z: 200})
})

debugData

This is a function allowing for mocking dispatched game script actions in a browser environment. It will trigger useNuiEvent handlers as if they were dispatched by the game scripts. It will only fire if the current environment is a regular browser and not CEF

Usage

// This will target the useNuiEvent hooks registered with `setVisible`
// and pass them the data of `true`
debugData([
  {
    action: 'setVisible',
    data: true,
  }
])

Misc Utils

These are small but useful included utilities.

  • isEnvBrowser() - Will return a boolean indicating if the current environment is a regular browser. (Useful for logic in development)

Development Workflow

This boilerplate was designed with development workflow in mind. It includes some helpful scripts to accomplish that.

Hot Builds In-Game

When developing in-game, you can use the hot build system by running the start:game script. This is essentially the start script but it writes to disk. Meaning all that is required is a resource restart to update the game script

Usage

# yarn
yarn start:game
# npm
npm run start:game

Production Builds

When you are done with development phase for your resource. You must create a production build that is optimized and minimized.

You can do this by running the following:

npm run build
yarn build