How To Share React Components between Apps with Bit

Bit: A powerful tool for efficient sharing of React components

This article introduces Bit, an open source tool that can significantly improve the code sharing efficiency between projects, especially React components, with extremely low additional overhead. Developers can use Bit to share parts of the code base and use them in other projects to easily synchronize changes without splitting the code base or modifying the source code structure.

The core advantage of Bit is that it decouples the representation of shared code from the project's file system. This means you can specify the components that Bit wants to share and export them from your project without changing its structure or source code. Once shared, these components can be installed using your favorite package manager and can be modified and updated in any project environment.

Bit also provides a feature called "Scopes", a collection of shared components with common properties. This enhances discoverability and clearly presents the components used across projects. Bit can significantly reduce development time, ensure consistency between projects, and improve component maintenance and updates.

Component Era

A framework of UI components like React allows us to split the UI into independent reusable components that can be independently developed and used. Therefore, React components can often be adjusted and reused across multiple projects and applications.

Rather than repeating work or reinventing the wheel, leverage the modularity and reusability of components to share them among projects.

Bit is exactly such an open source project that works in conjunction with Git and npm to speed up code sharing, reduce the extra overhead of splitting code bases and changing multiple packages. You can easily share parts of any existing repository, use them in other projects, and easily sync changes.

Difficulties in component sharing

Consider a React application with eight reusable components (located in the src/components directory), some of which also use global styles. If you want to use one of these components in another application, before Bit appears, the main approach is to split the repository, create a new repository, add all necessary configurations (including build and test environments), and publish a package. For eight components, this process needs to be repeated eight times, and it also causes code duplication. It ends up with nine repositories being maintained and changes are made between them.

Lerna can help, but it forces the project codebase to be refactored into a monorepo, and even so, it still requires manual definition and maintenance of settings and dependency trees for all these packages in the application. Furthermore, all of these packages are poorly found, which makes adoption even more difficult. Faced with this extra overhead, most people may end up choosing to copy and paste the code, which is a very bad practice.

Share React Components with Bit

Bit is the fastest way to share React components with little extra overhead.

Bit does not need to split the code base into multiple repositories, but allows you to easily share components from any existing repository and use them in other repositories and projects using npm.

The core idea of ​​Bit is to decouple the representation of shared code from the file system of the project. So you can simply point Bit to the component you want to share and export it from your project without actually changing its structure or source code. Once shared, you can use your favorite package manager to install components.

Another advantage of Bit is that it keeps track of the actual source code found in multiple repositories, so you can also use it to easily import the code of the component and change it from any other project and have Bit sync it for you Change.

Bit tracks components in the source code by decoupling the representation of components from the actual file structure and enables us to quickly convert any file or subset of files into reusable components. Using a simple glob pattern (as shown below), components from the entire library or project can be shared immediately without changing the source code itself or file structure.

Any component can be shared, discovered and used in any application or project alone. It can also be modified and updated in any project environment and can choose whether and how to get your friends to update your components from their own project (and vice versa).

Shared components can be combined into "Scopes", which can be considered as a "playlist" of a single component that shares common attributes. When using the free Bit Community Center, each component is presented with the visual effects it presents, test results, semi-automatically generated documents, and more.

No matter what tool is used to install components, we have full control over the dependency diagram and a clear understanding of the components used across projects. Shared code can also help align the UI with design principles, as we can easily control changes when the same component is implemented repeatedly in different projects.

Quick Start

The following is an example of how to share button, login, and logo UI components in the project directory structure:

<code>$ tree
.
├── App.js
├── App.test.js
├── favicon.ico
├── index.js
└── src
    └── components
        ├── button
        │   ├── Button.js
        │   ├── Button.spec.js
        │   └── index.js
        ├── login
        │   ├── Login.js
        │   ├── Login.spec.js
        │   └── index.js
        └── logo
            ├── Logo.js
            ├── Logo.spec.js
            └── index.js

5 directories, 13 files</code>

First, install Bit and initialize it for the project:

<code>npm install bit-bin -g
cd project-directory
bit init</code>

Now use Bit to track these components. Don't forget to add build and test environments.

<code>bit add src/components/* # 使用glob模式跟踪多个组件，或使用单个路径跟踪单个组件。</code>

Now use Bit to lock versions and define their dependencies:

<code>$ bit tag --all 1.0.0
3 components tagged | 3 added, 0 changed, 0 auto-tagged
added components:  components/button@1.0.0, components/login@1.0.0, components/logo@1.0.0</code>

Now share the component to the remote Scope:

<code>$ bit export username.scopename  # 将组件共享到此Scope
exported 3 components to scope username.scopename</code>

Note that using the --eject flag, you can remove the exported components from the source code and add them to the project package.json file as a package dependency.

That's it. You can now install components using npm and Yarn, or use Bit to easily edit and update their code from any project.

You can start using it here: [Bit official website link] (Bit official website link should be inserted here)

Make changes in any project

If you are using a code component that needs to be modified, you can import your component using Bit, change it directly in the project context, and share it back. Using the eject flag, you can even pop the component back into a package dependency in your project.

Note that even if the code is actually generated in these projects, Bit is able to track and synchronize source code changes across different projects. If you prefer, you can think of it as a "controlled copy-paste" without duplication.

Optimal

Bit is probably the fastest way to share React components with minimal extra costs. With Bit, you can avoid copying and pasting code and make it easier to change and maintain components while using them in different applications.

Your entire team can organize all components in Scope and create different versions for use in different locations. New team members can easily discover these components and join your work with existing code you already wrote.

Bit is an open source project that you can get started, give feedback or help improve it as you like!

FAQs on Easily Sharing React Components with Bit

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