django-react-toolkit

Set of tools that gives you easy start with ReactJS integration

About

Main goal of this project is to make django-react apps development and deployment easy in the most easiest way without much interfering to django and react internal project code.

Getting Started

Add django_react_toolkit to your installed apps:

INSTALLED_APPS=[
    ...
    'djnago_react_toolkit',
]

Functionalities:

1. Reverse Proxy server - manage.py runtkserver

⚠️ If you are working with create-react-app to add proxy: django_server to your package.json file and skip this option.

It's django-admin command used to start proxy server that sholud forward django and react traffic to one domain.

Setup

• Add proxy rule configuration to settings.py

DJ_REACT_PROXY_RULE=[
    #example configuration
    ('127.0.0.1',8000,['/api','/admin','/static']), # for django dev server
    ('127.0.0.1',3000,['.*']),                      # for react server
]

• Start django and react dev servers:

$ ./manage.py runserver
$ npm start

• Start proxy server:

$ ./manage.py runtkserver

Since our proxy is running default on port 8080. We can now access our django /api, /admin and /static and react /* from localhost:8080.

2. ServeReactView - django_react_toolkit.views.ServeReactView

Django view that serve us react production build files

Setup

Add configuration to settings.py:

# path to folder where you built your react app
REACT_BUILD_DIR = "/your_react_build_folder/build"

# files that should be served from root path like exmaple.com/favicon.ico
REACT_ROOT_FILES = ['favicon.ico', 'manifest.json', 'robots.txt'] # <= that is default value

# set of paths reserved for django
DJANGO_PATHS = ['api','admin','media','static'])


STATICFILES_DIRS = [
    ...
    REACT_BUILD_DIR / 'static'
]

Include django_react_toolkit urls in urls.py:

urlpatterns = [
    ...
    include('django_react_toolkit.urls`)
]

django_react_toolkit will take every request that does not match your DJANGO_PATHS and serve instead index.html or one of REACT_ROOT_FILES.

If you want some custom urls just import ServeReactView directly:

from django_react_toolkit.views import ServeReactView
...
urlpatters = [
    re_path(r'/react_app/.*',ServeReactView.as_view(),name="serve_react_view")
]

🖋️ If you have some static files (images,fonts,etc.) in react that are in public directory, you can also move them to public/static and after build they will be collected as well as js and css by django collectstatic.

3. ----

Spec:

Varibles:

• DJ_REACT_PROXY_RULE

  It's list that conatains 3 element touples: (host,port,endpoints_list). host - proxy IP address (default 127.0.0.1) port - port on which proxy will be served endpoints_list - list of valid python regex expressions that should match your route. You need to know that proxy rules are iterated and there is choosed first match, so if you put ['.*'] as an element of first tuple and ['/api'] in secend element, you would never reach /api endpoint. It would look like this:

  DJ_REACT_PROXY_RULE=[
      ('127.0.0.1',3000,['.*']),
      ('127.0.0.1',8000,['/api','/admin','/static']) #this can't be reached
      ]
  

• REACT_BUILD_DIR

  Path to react build

• REACT_ROOT_FILES

  List of filenames that should be served from root url. It means all files that directly under build/ dir

• DJANGO_PATHS

  List of paths that will be reserved for djngo. E.g. api or admin panel etc.

Commands:

• manage.py runtkserver

  Commad that starts reverse proxy server based on our configuration DJ_REACT_PROXY_RULE. It's used for serving react dev server and django dev server from same domain. manage.py runtkserver [--host (127.0.0.1)] [--port (8080)] For example: manage.py runtkserver --host 192.168.80.2 --port 8098 and then you should reach your server based on proxy rules defined in settings above at: 192.168.80.2:8098.

To Do:

• django base viewset for session and JWT authentication
• helper js functions for authentication in react
• manage.py command that stats reverse proxy server and development server at the same time