Isomorphic React + Flux film database example

Complete application example including user authentication using koa on server side, and React/Flux(Alt) on frontend. Also uses koa-mongo-rest to generate REST API, and restful.js to consume them. With a healthy dose of Bootstrap, using react-bootstrap.

Demo: https://react-example-filmdb.herokuapp.com

Libraries Included

• react
• react-router
• react-hot-loader
• react-bootstrap
• alt
• iso
• koa
• webpack
• babeljs
• koa-mongo-rest
• restful.js
• formsy-react

TL;DR

Use with iojs^1.8.0 or nodejs^0.12.0, clone the repo, npm install and npm run dev.

Learn React (react-prime-draft), learn Flux and Alt (alt guide).

Build for production with npm run build.

Concepts

Koa will be our server for the server side rendering, we use alt for our Flux architecture and react-router for routing in our app.

With iso as helper we can populate alt flux stores before the first rendering and have a complete async isomorphic React application.

For a more comprehensive guide to the source code, see wiki

Flux

We use alt singleton as Flux implementation.

On the server, it's similar but Flux is initialized using alt.bootstrap and for next rendering, the data are emptied using alt.flush

Installation / How-to

I recommend to use io.js to take advantages of ES6 without --harmony flag on NodeJS.

It's super easy to do with nvm:

• $ nvm install iojs
• $ nvm use iojs
• $ nvm alias default iojs (to make node default to iojs)

But it works well with nodejs^0.12.0 as well :)

Run the project in development:

• $ npm run dev

Run tests

• $ npm test will run the tests once
• $ ./node_modules/.bin/karma start will watch for changes and run the tests on change

Build project:

Just run $ npm run build, it will produce these tasks:

• Run tests from test/spec/**/*.jsx
• Concat & minify styles to /dist/app-[hash].css
• Concat & minify scripts to /dist/js/app-[hash].js

Run in production

Build the project first:

• $ npm run build

Then start the koa server:

• $ NODE_ENV=production node server/index.js (iojs)
• $ NODE_ENV=production node --harmony server/index.js (nodejs 0.12.x)

You can also use processes.json to run the application with PM2 Monitor on your production server (customize it for your use):

• $ pm2 start processes.json