Mastering React Component Development: Best Practices for Maintenance, Testing, and Reusability

Originally published on www.ghazikhan.in

React is a popular library for creating user interfaces with JavaScript. React components are reusable pieces of code that can render UI elements, handle events, manage state, and perform other tasks.

As an author of 4 NPM libraries which include 3 React Component Libraries and 1 NodeJS Library. In this blog post, I will share some best practices for building React components that are easy to maintain, test, and reuse.

• Use functional components over class components. Functional components are simpler, more concise, and easier to test than class components. They also support hooks, which are a powerful way to add state and side effects to your components without using classes or lifecycle methods.

• Use prop types and default props. Prop types are a way to specify the types and validations of the props that your component expects. Default props are a way to provide default values for the props that are not required or not passed by the parent component. Using prop types and default props can help you avoid bugs, document your component's API, and improve the developer experience. It would be great if you use Typescript.

• Use custom hooks for common logic. Custom hooks are a way to extract and reuse common logic that is shared by multiple components. For example, you can create a custom hook for fetching data from an API, managing a form state, or accessing a global context. Custom hooks can help you avoid code duplication, improve readability, and simplify testing.

• Use styled-components for styling. Styled-components is a library that lets you write CSS-in-JS, which means you can define your styles as JavaScript objects or template literals and apply them to your components. Styled-components can help you avoid conflicts with global styles, use dynamic props or themes for styling, and co-locate your styles with your components.

• Use React Testing Library for testing. React Testing Library is a library that helps you test your React components in a way that simulates how users interact with them. React Testing Library can help you avoid testing implementation details, focus on user behavior, and write tests that are more reliable and maintainable.

• Use tsdx if you want to scaffold a component library with typescript. It does all the heavy lifting and give you an initial point to start component development. You can check this blog for step by step guide with tsdx component development