Integrating React with Drupal: A Beginners Guide
Combining React with Drupal is a popular way to create awesome websites. This post will show you how to do it, step by step.
Why Use React and Drupal Together?
React makes fast, cool-looking user interfaces. Drupal is great for managing content. By using Drupal’s APIs, you can build a React app that talks to Drupal in the back-end. It’s the best of both worlds!
Getting Started: Decoupled vs. Partially Decoupled
You can do it two ways:
- Decoupled: Completely separate the front-end and back-end. Your React app is independent and talks to Drupal through APIs.
- Partially Decoupled: Use React inside a regular Drupal setup, using custom modules. You get React’s interactivity with some of Drupal’s rendering.
Step-by-Step Guide
- Set Up the Module Structure
- Create a custom Drupal module for your React app
- Make the necessary folders and files
- Add React Dependencies
- Use npm or yarn to install React and other libraries you need
- Create the React App
- Use Create React App to quickly set up a new React project
- Build the project to generate the static files
- Integrate React with Drupal
- Move the build files to your Drupal module
- Update the module to serve the files correctly
- Add hooks to load your React app
- Configure APIs
- Make sure Drupal exposes data through RESTful or GraphQL APIs
- Your React app will fetch and display content using these APIs
- Fetch Data in React
- Use fetch or a library like Axios to make API calls to Drupal
- Display the data in your React components
Conclusion
Integrating React with Drupal gives you the best of both worlds. Follow this guide to set up your project, and start building awesome websites today!