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React Go Base

A template repository to create simple React web apps with a Go powered backend. The output is a single binary with your static JS/HTML/CSS assets embedded within it, for easy distribution and running on low spec'd hardware like Raspberry Pis or other devboards.

Setup and usage

Clone this repository:

git clone https://github.com/brentjo/react-go-template && cd react-go-template

Build the project:

make

Run the binary:

./go-react-example

Requirements

  • Go: https://go.dev/dl/
  • esbuild: installed and accessible in your $PATH — npm install -g esbuild
  • make: brew install make if you don't already have it, and use homebrew

How does it work?

  1. You write React components within src/components
    • There are two examples in this repository:
      • counter.jsx: a click-counter that's purely client side driven.
      • time.jsx: a component that fetches the current time from the /api/time route on the Go backend.
    • Update the root app.jsx to use the new components you write. There is also minimal client side routing support, so you can render different components per path.
  2. Write any needed backend APIs within Go
  3. At build time, the JSX is transpiled with esbuild and copied into a directory for publishing, along with the static React library dependencies within the /static folder
  4. These contents are placed into an embedded file system at compile time, so the final output is self-contained within the binary, and there's no need to copy around HTML/JS/CSS separately.
  5. Run the built binary, and you have your React app being served, along with any API routes you wrote.

Why?

In the past I would use Next.js or Ruby with Sinatra when I needed to create a simple local-network web app, but I always found working with them on devboards/mini-PCs a bit painful: the devboard might not support the runtime, deploying and managing the dependencies with npm / gem was tough and prone to breakage depending on how it was set up, the apps would often run out of memory, etc.

Go is fantastic on all these fronts: it's compiled to a single binary for easy deployment, the language has great hardware support, it's very fast and you're in control of your memory footprint while still working in a memory-safe language, etc.

You would never want to build out a React app with any amount of complexity with this. See https://react.dev/learn/start-a-new-react-project for why you generally want to use a 'batteries included framework' when working with React, but for the use-cases like 'simple single page IoT dashboard' that I just want to style with plain CSS and use minimal 3rd party libraries, I found this pattern pleasant to work with.