SSR Chunking Solution

The goal was to create both a client and server that supports hot-reloading. This uses a more updated version of loadable that's typed out, and also uses the new React.createContext().

• SSR Chunking Solution
  • Features
  • Installation
  • Caveats
  • Credits

Features

Development:

• Simple to follow
• Typescript (woo)
• Hot reloading client AND server
  • Server supports hot reloading based on webpack entry. A good way to support it is through exporting middleware then bootstrapping your app with the bootstrap bundle.
  • See src/server
• In-memory filestem for server and client
  • Previously webpack-dev-middleware only worked on client side, and server-side in-memory has only worked if your server bundle is 1 file. This is because if you use import() then the in-memory filesystem would attempt to import from your real file-system so it would error. This is patched.
• Server doesn't have to restart unless you modify non-webpack server files.

React:

• Async components
• Resolution of async chunks on server side
  • Async chunks resolve before server starts, so no <Loading/> components server-side--same as webpack-universal and loadable.
  • When the client bundle needs chunk ie: 0.[hash].js, it fetches that chunk. Wouldn't it be nice if the server knew that's the chunk it needed before the client-side code parsed the bundle? This solution handles all that for you.
• I didn't like how flimsy webpack-universal and loadable were because they either depended on too many config settings, or relied on /* webpackChunkName: "foo" */ either with Babel plugins, or manually. ES modules don't have magic comments so I wanted to solve this through other means.
• No need for poorly supported webpack stats plugins. Both loadable and webpack-universal use webpack plugins to extract stats. This uses an existing well supported stats plugin to format the stats exactly how you need.
• Extracting CSS chunks/modules just work out-of-the-box.

Installation

This package uses yarn so it assumes you have it installed.

• yarn install or npm install
• yarn dev or npm run dev for hot-reloading in-memory development.
• yarn prod or npm run prod to compile the production build
• yarn start to start up the production build

Caveats

• You must export both client and server stats, but they're small...usually.
• Running the dev server with your webpack configs set to mode: "production" sometimes crashes the server. I am working on a solution to this.

Credits

• React Loadable - https://github.com/jamiebuilds/react-loadable
• Webpack - https://github.com/webpack/webpack