Anatomy of a Dash component library

[xhluca]

When we look at the root of the generated component library, we notice a lot of files from various aspects of Dash. We will have files related to

• JS (.eslintrc, src/, index.html),
• webpack (webpack.config.js, webpack.serve.config.js),
• npm (package.json, .npmignore, package-lock.json),
• R (.Rbuildignore, R/, inst/deps/),
• Julia (src/),
• pypi (MANIFEST.in, setup.py)
• docs (.md files)
• etc.

Although you get a hang of what each file does after a while, I think it might be a bit disorienting for a beginner, especially since the files span 4 different languages. It would be nice to have a md doc describing what each file does, whether you will need to worry about it not. The doc could be grouped by language (Python, R, JS, Julia).

Thoughts on this?

[xhluca]

To expand on this, if there's some way to move all files related to a directory, that'd make the repo much cleaner, e.g.:

js_dev/
  .eslintrc
  demo/
    App.js
    index.js
  index.html
  .npmignore
  webpack.config.js
  webpack.serve.config.js
  package-lock.json
  package.json
  ...

jl_dev/
  MyDashComponent.jl
  ...

r_dev/
  .Rbuildignore/
  ...

py_dev/
  tests/
  venv/
  demos/
  usage.py

dash_builds/
  my_dash_component/
  R/
  inst/deps
  man/
  NAMESPACE

This is a simple way for everyone to understand which files you are supposed to edit if you are building a component for a certain language, and you can also ignore dash_builds if you don't want to commit auto-generated files. Also it will result in significantly less files in the root directory (I don't use 80% of them most of the time)

[xhluca]

Or perhaps we can adopt the CRA approach: a root level public/ directory for files that should be included in the build/.

Then we can additionally have a public/ directory inside each *_dev directory that add to/overrides the files in public/ in the final build/. We could have a structure like this:

js_dev/
  public/
    my_file.js
  ...

py_dev/
  public/
    setup.py

jl_dev/
  public/
     custom.jl

r_dev/
  public/
    .RBuildignore

public/
  LICENSE
  README.md

# Auto-generated:
build/
  python/
    README.md
    LICENSE
    setup.py
  r/
    README.md
    LICENSE
    .Rbuildignore
  jl/
    README.md
    LICENSE
    custom.jl