Develop Reference

Other way to share react ts components between projects

I have been looking for a way to mostly share some code between projects specifically for SPFX and fluent ui. We found 3 main ways to do that.
1.
Creating a component library is the way that seemed least complicated cause it uses the same infrastructure and do all building without the need to configure it.
But this adds some issues, we need to built and manually link the solution locally to make it work, this will also work if we put in a repo. so this is mitigated.
The second is that implicitly this will also require the fluent ui and react. Plus having to place it inside a SPFX component library project.
2.
I saw some promise using paths in ts and this works fine while using the ts compiler. It will go to the folder that your proj is referring and build it at calling time. which is great. But it did not work in SPFX.
3.
Another way was to have a post install to sync the folders which seems easy enough but I wonder how practical this is plus how people are doing it, if they are, how.
All I wanted to figure out now is a way to take my component code and share as if they were in a folder of my src or a simple extension of the code. No need to have extra dependencies or build steps, just the code that can be used as a ts/tsx file. ex:
shared lib:
//assuming I have react and fluentui already installed for the project.
import button from 'fluentui';
export const fancyCustomButtom = (props) => {
return (<Button text="Standard" />);
};
src project folder:
import {fancyCustomButtom} from 'shared-lib'
It is fine if it needs to build the files before we can use it but can we do it at build time or when the package is installed? also wouldn't it increase my bundle size by making both module dependent on things already available (react, fluentui)?

Given the way Microsoft have architected the loading of bundles in SharePoint and Teams - I believe an SPFX component library is the best way to share code between different solutions, particularly if you are looking to minimise bundle size...
Imagine you have a library for something re-usable: a form, a set of standard branded components - something of that nature. You could put your shared code in repos and add references to it - either by publishing your own repo publicly or using the npm install git+https://yourUrl syntax; but what effectively happens there is that your code is pulled down in to node_modules for each project, and any referenced module code is included in your bundles. If you have two, three, four or more webparts on the same page - using those same libraries, you're multiplying how many times that code is included on the page.
If you follow Microsoft's guide on setting up a component library project however, your npm link commands allow your types to be recognised in consuming projects without needing to actually include the bundled distribution code. You can deploy your library code once to the App Catalog, and if it's referenced in other solutions -- it's loaded on pages as needed: once.
I have found the development experience to be quite flaky at times, but it does work. When I run gulp clean on my library code, or come back to it after some time, I sometimes find that I need to run npm link and npm link my-project-name again as per the instructions in the above tutorial. Whenever you run gulp build on your library, you should also rebuild the project that consumes the library, either by using gulp build / bundle or by saving a file (if you're running gulp serve). This process works well for developing, and once it comes time to deploy, all you need to do is add a named reference to your library inside package.json and then deploy both .sppkg files to your App Catalog.
In terms of your last question re: bundle size - react is not actually included in the dependencies for an SPFX library project, but you will find it's available to use. When you build your library, if you take a look in the generated javascript in your dist folder, you will see it's listed as one of the dependencies for the webpacked content along with react-dom and ControlStrings. It's on line 1.
office-ui-fabric-react is included as a devDependency thanks to the #microsoft/sp-webpart-workbench package that gets scaffolded with all SPFX projects - and if you check your library's dist javascript, you will see that included components are being webpacked and included in your bundle. I'm not entirely sure if when you pull this code in to your consuming project, whether webpack then tree-shakes to de-duplicate and ensures only necessary code is included: I don't know. Someone else may be able to illuminate us there or provide a more accurate explanation of what's going on... I will update this response if anyone comments to let me know.
And finally, this is more of a personal way of working, but it may be worth consideration:
When developing a library, I sometimes reference it in other projects via a local npm install ../filepath command. This ensures that when I install the library as described, the consuming project installs any necessary dependencies. I'm able to tweak both projects if I need o. When it comes time to deploy, I commit my changes to both projects, deploy my library code to the App Catalog, and then npm uninstall the library from the consuming project and add a reference as described in the above tutorial. When I deploy projects that use my library, they just work.
I recently developed a library that uses pnpjs, in particular the #pnp/sp library that is used to talk to SharePoint. If you look at the Getting Started guide for that library, they expect you to pass a reference to your Application Customizer or Web Part context during setup, or explicitly set things up using a base URL and so forth - and of course, a library doesn't really have a page context of any sort - the whole point of this code is that it's reusable. So that poses a challenge. My solution was to do the setup in the consuming web part(s) and ensure that they pass a reference to the sp object (which is of type SPRest) to any code or components that exist in my library. My library has peerDependencies on those pnp libraries so that the code isn't duplicated in consuming projects. Sometimes you have to think about what your library needs to include in its bundle and what you expect consuming solutions to already have, and maybe find ways to ensure things aren't included that aren't needed.
For example, in the scenario you talk about, you may want to ensure fluentui or office-ui-fabric-react are only devDependencies or peerDependencies for your library. As long as your library and the project(s) consuming your library both use the right version(s) you shouldn't have any trouble, and you can document any pre-requisites with your library documentation. You can check which versions of these libraries are installed per the SPFX version you are currently using ie. SPFX v1.11 or v1.12 etc. Just run npm ls <packagename> to get a breakdown, or check your package.json file.

webpack transpiling using --watch and setting up react files

So I am using the following tutorial. I can access the localhost, but I am putting in an html file. The tutorial does not go into depth about setting up a javascript file and getting that file to transpile. Can someone help me with the setup. I have googled this topic and I keep coming across tutorials that talk about needing babel for the transpiling, yet the tutorial says
Now that everything’s ready to go, we can get webpack to watch for
code changes in our directory and transpile.
But I feel like this means it should just bundle up everything in my project since webpack is a bundling product. Further, I am confused by the call to webpack:
CMD webpack --watch --watch-polling
Does this mean I don't need to put in an entry point and endpoint? I thought with webpack I need to provide those two details, but the tutorial again is calling directly to just polling.
Thanks in advance for any help getting my structure setup so I can run webpack, react in docker.
In terms of setting up the files, I had to add
COPY wwwroot ./wwwroot
Just to get the project to display something at localhost. But I want files to be brought over automatically if possible. But I am not sure of the intent of the tutorial with regards to file structure.

MEAN.JS Cannot connect MongoDB

I am newbie here, starting to learn MEAN.JS, As I installed everything and tried to run
grunt --force
on the command line, it returns an error like the image below.
Im using windows here and also I already installed MongoDB on the C:/Program Files path. Thanks in advance! :)

Getting started with the MEAN stack might seem very daunting at first. You might think that there is too much new technology to learn. The truth is that you really only need to know “Javascript.” That’s right, MEAN is simply a javascript web development stack.
So, how do you actually get started developing on the MEAN stack?
The first step is to set up a project structure. I’ve found the following structure to make the most sense:
controllers/ db/ package.json server.js public/
This structure lets you keep the entire stack in a single project. Your AngularJS front end can go into the public folder while all your Express API logic goes into controller and your MongoDB collections and logic go into the db folder.
Now that you’ve set up a general project structure, you need to initialize your public folder as an Angular project. It is best to do this using a tool called Yeoman.
Yeoman is a toolkit that makes it easy for you to get started with a variety of Javascript frameworks and other web frameworks like Bootstrap and foundation. You can learn more about Yeoman at Yeoman.io.
Installing Yeoman is pretty straightforward.
You can read more here: http://www.citizentekk.com/mean-stack-tutorial-how-to-build-loosely-coupled-scalable-web-apps-nodejs-angularjs-applications/

How to publishing an angular2 directives

I have written an angular2 directive called ng2-clearfix. The typescript code itself is ready, it's tested and works just fine.
I now want to publish the directive on github so others can use it as well, i had a few questions while doing that:
How should i serve the file? Like should i provide ng2-clearfix.js file or should i just leave ng2-clearfix.ts and let the user compile typescript to javascript.
How should i manage dependancies for ng2-clearfix itself. I want to publish it on both npm and bower. i think using bower for my own dependency management will be a problem because the developer using ng2-clearfix may or may not be using bower.
Thanks for you time.
Also if you know a boilerplate for angular2 directive please let me know, that would make tasks easier.

Well, you can start by using this amazing tool generator-angular2-library
Iv'e used it recently for a library I wrote for Ionic2, and it really saved me some time.
It is a pretty simple Yeoman generator that produces you a skeleton for your library.
Then, after you finish organizing your app, you can publish it to npm.
Since Angular 2 uses Typescript, all the files should eventually be transpiled to javascript.
The basic idea is to keep all the source files in your repository, compile the files and publish them to npm under the right version. You should not commit the compiled files to the repository.
Your'e welcome to look at the library I wrote to see how things basically work: https://github.com/kadoshms/ionic2-autocomplete

Is there a "standard" way to publish open source javascript files

Coming from the java/maven world where everything goes under a "src/main" folder I looked around to see if a similar approach is followed in javascript. However all the main repo's seem to be following their own. Is there a standard folder structure with which I can publish my javascript files? Is the community at least "leaning" towards some such structure or template?
JQuery
Backbone

TJ Holowaychuk started "Component" as a structured way of sharing/deploying UI components with traced dependencies. Similar to the way NPM is for NodeJS modules.
https://github.com/component
Now it seems that Bower is taking over and is the new the way to go.