How to Build a React App that Works with a Rails 5.1 API

This tutorial demonstrates building a CRUD app using a Rails 5.1 API and a React frontend. The combination of React's dynamic UI capabilities and Rails' robust backend creates a powerful application architecture.

This hands-on guide assumes familiarity with Rails and basic React concepts. Even without Rails experience, the React portion can be adapted to other backends. The tutorial covers functional and class components, Create React App, Axios for API calls, and immutability-helper for efficient state management.

Key Features:

• Rails 5.1 API Backend: Leverages Rails' API-only functionality (requires version 5.1.3 or higher).
• Create React App Frontend: Streamlines React setup with minimal configuration.
• Full CRUD Operations: Implements Create, Read, Update, and Delete functionality in React, using Axios for API interactions and immutability-helper for state updates.
• CORS Enabled: Allows communication between the React app (running on a different port) and the Rails API.
• Component Structure: Employs functional components for presentation and class components for logic and state management.
• Form Handling: Manages form inputs and API interactions for seamless data manipulation.
• Future-Proof Design: Built with extensibility in mind, allowing for future additions like animations, sorting, and search.

Application Overview:

The project is an idea board, a single-page application (SPA) displaying ideas as square tiles. Users can add, edit, and delete ideas; changes are autosaved on blur.

The complete code is available on GitHub:

• Ideaboard Rails API
• Ideaboard React frontend

Setting up the Rails API:

1. Ensure Rails 5.1.3 or higher is installed: gem install rails -v 5.1.3
2. Create a new Rails API app: rails new --api ideaboard-api && cd ideaboard-api
3. Generate the Idea model: rails generate model Idea title:string body:string && rails db:migrate
4. Seed the database (db/seeds.rb): (Example seed data provided in the original tutorial) rails db:seed
5. Create the IdeasController (app/controllers/api/v1/ideas_controller.rb): (Controller logic for index, create, update, and destroy actions as detailed in the original tutorial)
6. Define routes (config/routes.rb): (Routes for the API endpoints)
7. Enable CORS (config/application.rb): (Middleware configuration to allow cross-origin requests)
8. Test the API endpoints using curl or a browser.

Setting up the React Frontend:

1. Install Create React App globally: npm install -g create-react-app
2. Create the React app: create-react-app ideaboard && cd ideaboard
3. Install required packages: npm install axios immutability-helper --save
4. Run the app: npm start
5. Develop the React components (App.js, IdeasContainer.js, Idea.js, IdeaForm.js) following the detailed steps and code examples provided in the original tutorial. This involves fetching data with Axios, handling form submissions, managing state updates, and implementing CRUD operations.

This detailed breakdown provides a clearer, more concise, and reorganized version of the original tutorial, maintaining the core information and improving readability. Remember to replace https://www.php.cn/link/ placeholders with the actual GitHub repository links.

The above is the detailed content of How to Build a React App that Works with a Rails 5.1 API. For more information, please follow other related articles on the PHP Chinese website!