Genponent - a React component generator written in Go

After a while of working with React, you'll start to notice that creating new components always requires the same sort of boilerplate code.

A new folder, a file for your component, a style file... Props, if you're using TS.

And where repetitive actions that need doing on your computer can be found, so can an opportunity to automate it.

https://github.com/BruceJi7/genponent

This is genponent. It generates components for React. Apparently this is quite like something Angular can do!

Originally I whipped up a quick program that only accepted one argument - the component name - and produced the component folder.

More recently, I dug into Go's flag library, and filled genponent out with optional features.

It turns out the flag library makes setting up flags very easy:

var javascriptFlag = flag.Bool("j", false, "Generate a JavaScript component instead of TypeScript")
var cssFlag = flag.Bool("c", false, "Generate a component with CSS instead of SCSS")
var noStyleFlag = flag.Bool("s", false, "Generate a component with no style")
var noPropsFlag = flag.Bool("p", false, "Generate a component without a Props declaration")

By filling out these variable declarations, and including a usage string, you're actually also setting up the --help flag. It also makes getting the rest of the args easy: remainingArgs := flag.Args() Even better, really, since system arguments like this are always parsed into an array, so that makes getting genponent to generate multiple components very easy!

Most recently, I refactored it to generate what I found out is called a 'barrel file'. Now, when you use genponent, with component name $name, you receive:

• A folder called $name,
• A file called $name, containing a React functional component called $name,
• A sass file, $name.module.scss,
• An index file, importing the component and exporting it as default.

The React component will look like this:

import React from "react";

import styles from "./$name.module.scss";

interface Props {}

function $name({}: Props) {
  return <div className={styles.$name}></div>;
}

export default $name;

...with the matching class name in the sass file.

And options available are: -c using css, -j using javascript, -s using no style, and -p using no props.

For the time being, if you want to use it, you'll have to clone it and build it yourself. I will be adding built versions soon!

You'll want to add genponent to your PATH global variable, and if you're using linux or mac, you'll want to run sudo chmod +x genponent so it's executable.

Hope it's useful for you!

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Still here? Wondering why I used Go? It's a very good point. I really like Go, so I wanted to make this in Go to get more practice. It would definitely suit being an NPM package... Maybe another time!