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JavaScript Stack from Scratch

Welcome to my modern JavaScript stack tutorial: JavaScript Stack from Scratch.

This is a minimalistic and straight-to-the-point guide to assembling a JavaScript stack. It requires some general programming knowledge, and JavaScript basics. It focuses on wiring tools together and giving you the simplest possible example for each tool. You can see this tutorial as a way to write your own boilerplate from scratch.

You don't need to use this entire stack if you build a simple web page with a few JS interactions of course (a combination of Browserify/Webpack + Babel + jQuery is enough to be able to write ES6 code in different files with CLI compilation), but if you want to build a web app that scales, and need help setting things up, this tutorial will work great for you.

Since the goal of this tutorial is to assemble various tools, I do not go into details about how these tools work individually. Refer to their documentation or find other tutorials if you want to acquire deeper knowledge in them.

A big chunk of the stack described in this tutorial uses React. If you are beginning and just want to learn React, create-react-app will get you up and running with a React environment very quickly with a premade configuration. I would for instance recommend this approach to someone who arrives in a team that's using React and needs to catch up with a learning playground. In this tutorial you won't use a premade configuration, because I want you to understand everything that's happening under the hood.

Code examples are available for each chapter, and you can run them all with yarn && yarn start or npm install && npm start. I recommend writing everything from scratch yourself by following the step-by-step instructions of each chapter.

Every chapter contains the code of previous chapters, so if you are simply looking for a boilerplate project containing everything, just clone the last chapter and you're good to go.

Note: The order of chapters is not necessarily the most educational. For instance, testing / type checking could have been done before introducing React. It is quite difficult to move chapters around or edit past ones, since I need to apply those changes to every following chapter. If things settle down, I might reorganize the whole thing in a better way.

The code of this tutorial works on Linux, macOS, and Windows.

1 - Node, NPM, Yarn, and package.json

2 - Installing and using a package

3 - Setting up ES6 with Babel and Gulp

4 - Using the ES6 syntax with a class

5 - The ES6 modules syntax

6 - ESLint

7 - Client app with Webpack

8 - React

9 - Redux

10 - Immutable JS and Redux Improvements

11 - Testing with Mocha, Chai, and Sinon