This project was bootstrapped with Create React App.

cra-template-josh-ts

This is a template to quickly initialise a react project with, what I believe to be, best practices in mind. The technologies initialised are: React, TypeScript, ESlint, Prettier, Emotion CSS-in-JS, and Cypress automated testing. This will preconfigure ESLint, Prettier, and a tsconfig file, and also provides instruction on how to alter it to suite your needs. It also provides the useful VSCode extensions for this template. A .env file and a cypress.env.json file are also created, and automatically added to a .gitignore to ensure sensitive info is not committed.

Relevant VSCode Extensions

Below is a list of the VSCode extensions recommended to get the most out of this template. Note, the ones with asterixis (*) I consider required, or their equivalent if using a different IDE/editor.

• Bracket Pair Colorizer (*)
• ESLint (*)
• GitLens (*)
• JavaScript and Typescript Nightly (*)
• Prettier (*)
• vscode-styled-components (*)
• ES7 React/Redux/GraphQL snippets
• JavaScript (ES6) code snippets
• Redux DevTools
• Sass/Less/Stylus/Pug/Jade/Typesciprt/Javascript Compile hero process
• Simple React Snippets

CSS-in-JS

This project currently uses Emotion for CSS. This allows the creation of css stylings in the same file as Components to keep things scoped nicely.

The following comment is required at the top of every file which will use css-in-js, as this tells React to grab the JSX creation from emotion instead of React.createElement.

1/** @jsxImportSource @emotion/react */

This means we can create styles like this:

1import React from "react";
2import { css } from "@emotion/react";
3
4const hoverColor = "green";
5
6const styling = css`
7	color: red;
8	&:hover {
9		color: ${hoverColor};
10		font-size: 20px;
11	}
12`;

Note, this will have syntax highlighting and autocomplete for the css when the above extensions are installed.

We then add the stylings as such using the css property we imported.

1const Another: React.FC = (): JSX.Element => {
2	return (
3		<div css={styling}>
4			<h2>Another thing here.</h2>
5		</div>
6	);
7};

Package Manager

This uses Yarn as a package manager. If yarn has never been used, install it first (https://classic.yarnpkg.com/en/docs/install/#windows-stable).

• yarn add -D <package> for dev dependencies
• yarn global add <package> for global deps
• yarn install for installing the project
• yarn <script> to run a script in package.json.

ESLint

This project uses ESLint as a linter, and Prettier as a code formatter. The .eslintrc.js file handles the settings for linting, currently it just uses the default "react-app" settings. However, this can be adjusted to adhere to different rules.

1module.exports = {
2	extends: ["react-app", "react-app/jest"],
3	rules: {
4		quotes: ["error", "single"],
5	},
6};

The above the project would need single quotes for all strings rather than double, and would throw an error if doing so. If we wanted instead a warning (could still run), we would specify to "warn".

1module.exports = {
2	extends: ["react-app", "react-app/jest"],
3	rules: {
4		quotes: ["warn", "single"],
5	},
6};

The rules can be found on eslint.org. To make ESLint ignore some files, we can use the ignorePatterns option in the .eslintrc.js file to give some files to ignore:

1module.exports = {
2	extends: ["react-app", "react-app/jest"],
3	ignorePatterns: ["src/**/__tests/"],
4};

The above tells ESLint not to run on any file in a folder called __tests__ that is in any subdirectory (or a direct child of) src.

1module.exports = {
2	extends: ["react-app", "react-app/jest"],
3	ignorePatterns: ["**/*.{js,jsx}"],
4};

The above tells ESLint not to run on any file in any directory which has the extension of .js or .jsx.

Finally, we add TypeScript support via a couple plugins that are already installed, and should be installed with a yarn install command.

1module.exports = {
2	extends: [
3		"react-app",
4		"react-app/jest",
5		"eslint:recommended",
6		"plugin:@typescript-eslint/eslint-recommended",
7		"plugin:@typescript-eslint/recommended",
8	],
9};

Can also run yarn lint to lint everything in src. This will show any warnings or errors that won't be autosolved by prettier (see below).

Prettier

The .prettierrc.js file contains the formatting that prettier will automatically adhere to.

1module.exports = {
2	tabWidth: 4,
3	semi: true,
4	singleQuote: false,
5	useTabs: true,
6};

These rules again can be found online. To get prettier and eslint to work, ensure the following properties are in the VSCode user settings.

1"editor.defaultFormatter": "esbenp.prettier-vscode",
2"editor.formatOnSave": true,
3"eslint.validate": [
4    "javascript",
5    "javascriptreact",
6    { "language": "typescript", "autoFix": true },
7    { "language": "typescriptreact", "autoFix": true }
8  ],
9"javascript.updateImportsOnFileMove.enabled": "always",

This will cause prettier to format code on every save. This means that, if the Prettier settings and the ESLint/tsconfig are setup correctly, prettier should always cause no warnings to appear due to ESLint. But they probably still will as is the software life ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

Cypress Testing

This project using automated testing using Cypress. This can be run from the terminal yarn cypress open or by running the cy:dev script with yarn cy:dev. This opens the cypress test runner. The tests are from the cypress/integration folder. Each can be run, or all can be run at once. To get intellisense on cypress commands, add /// <reference types="Cypress" /> to the top of each cypress test file (spec.js). You can also write these tests in TypeScript if you want, they are in JavaScript to highlight that you can use both TS and JS in the same project without issues.

Before running the tests, ensure that the dev server is running on localhost:3000 in a separate terminal window. TO provide sensitive information in a secure way when doing automated testing (passwords etc), we use a cypress.env.json file, in which we store our env variables for cypress testing (note: we can also use a normal .env file and prefix our cypress env vars with CYPRESS_ too).

1{
2	"adminUsername": "admin",
3	"adminPassword": "password444"
4}
5
6// OR in normal .env file
7CYPRESS_adminUsername=admin
8CYPRESS_adminPassword=password444

Then, in a cypress test, we would write:

1describe("First test", () => {
2	it("Admin login works", () => {
3		cy.visit("http://localhost:3000");
4		cy.get("#login-username").type(Cypress.env(`adminUsername`));
5		cy.get("#login-password").type(Cypress.env(`adminPassword`));
6	});
7});

To run these tests in headless mode, use yarn cy:run - this is, by default, set to run with no config file (--config-file false), however this can be changed after running yarn cy:dev once to generate a cypress.json file, then pointing the config file at this location.

This will get cypress to select the elements on the page with a id property of login-username/login-password respectively, and type in each of the values found in the env variables.

Linux/WSL

NOTE - if you are using this via a Linux shell, you must install the following dependencies (as root user) before cypress will work (see https://docs.cypress.io/guides/guides/continuous-integration.html#Advanced-setup):

1apt-get install libgtk2.0-0 libgtk-3-0 libgbm-dev libnotify-dev libgconf-2-4 libnss3 libxss1 libasound2 libxtst6 xauth xvfb

If this fails, you may need to update your current packages.

1sudo apt-get update

If an issue with installing xvfb still occurs after the above, try installing it again:

1sudo apt-get install xvfb

Right now, Cypress seems to struggle functioning correctly on WSL1 distros, therefore it is recommended to upgrade to WSL2 to use Cypress correctly.