Book Image

Progressive Web Apps with React

By : Scott Domes
Book Image

Progressive Web Apps with React

By: Scott Domes

Overview of this book

For years, the speed and power of web apps has lagged behind native applications. Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) aim to solve this by bridging the gap between the web apps and native apps, delivering a host of exciting features. Simultaneously, React is fast becoming the go-to solution for building modern web UIs, combining ease of development with performance and capability. Using React alongside PWA technology will make it easy for you to build a fast, beautiful, and functional web app. After an introduction and brief overview of the goals of PWAs, the book moves on to setting up the application structure. From there, it covers the Webpack build process and the process of creating React components. You'll learn how to set up the backend database and authentication solution to communicate with Firebase and how to work with React Router. Next, you will create and configure your web app manifest, making your PWA installable on mobile devices. Then you'll get introduced to service workers and see how they work as we configure the app to send push notifications using Firebase Cloud Messaging. We'll also explore the App Shell pattern, a key concept in PWAs and look at its advantages regarding efficient performance. Finally, you'll learn how to add of?ine capabilities to the app with caching and confirm your progress by auditing your PWA with Lighthouse. Also, you'll discover helper libraries and shortcuts that will help you save time and understand the future of PWA development.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Using the Lighthouse CLI


Running the tests from the Audits tab is nice and easy, but how can we ensure that the quality of our application is maintained before we push it live?

The answer is to incorporate Lighthouse into our deploy process, and use it to assess our build automatically. This is similar to having a test suite run when we hit yarn deploy. Fortunately, Google supplies with a Lighthouse CLI for exactly this purpose.

Let’s install it with the following:

yarn add --dev lighthouse

Here, our goal is to run Lighthouse on our application whenever we run yarn deploy. To do so, we have to make a custom deploy script.

If you open up our package.json, you’ll see the following under scripts:

 "scripts": {
   "build": "node_modules/.bin/webpack --config webpack.config.prod.js",
   "start": "node_modules/.bin/webpack-dev-server",
   "deploy": "npm run build && firebase deploy"
 },

Let's change that to the following:

 "scripts": {
   "build": "node_modules/.bin/webpack --config webpack.config...