Embed create-react-app in dev mode on another site - embed

Question

I'm developing a Wordpress "widget" that is going to be a little react app. I've chosen create-react-app for this purpose.
Now I can see how to run the development server standalone easily enough, but I'd like to develop it while it sits inside the Wordpress website. I've created a trivial "Custom HTML" widget:
<div id="root"></div>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://localhost:8080/static/js/bundle.js"></script>
This does not seem to work however...
Note I came up with /static/js/bundle.js by looking at the requests in the network tab when loading http://localhost:8080 directly, which is the prescribed way to access the dev version of the app.
So how do I access the development version of the app (with all the live reloading goodness) while embedded on my local version of the Wordpress site?

Answer 1

I had this same problem today in a PHP app I am developing. It is very frustrating to embed a create-react-app in development mode, and I had to consult a lot of different resources to learn how to do so. Here is a summary of my findings.
Using an iframe
Using an iframe to embed the create-react-app, as #quickshiftin suggests, is not a bad idea, but if you wish to pass configuration to the embedded SPA by calling methods or setting global variables in Javascript, it will not work* -- as the MDN documentation says (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/iframe#scripting), iframes are subject to the same-origin policy.
* (Note: I found out after writing most of this answer that there is indeed a way to bypass the same-origin policy. It's called Window.postMessage(), and it's also mentioned in the section of the MDN documentation that I linked above. You may want to consider using that. But if you would like to avoid using an iframe for whatever reason, read on :)
Create-React-App file structure; embedding in production mode
The first thing you must know is that embedding bundle.js is not enough -- create-react-app builds multiple JS files that need to be embedded using <script> tags in the correct order. This blog post by Jeremiah Tabb describes the file structure of the bundled code and suggests a way to embed the create-react-app in production: https://betterprogramming.pub/how-to-embed-a-react-application-on-any-website-1bee1d15617f
The filenames of the bundled code contain hashes which change at every build. The hashing can't be disabled, it's a WONTFIX in create-react-app (https://github.com/facebook/create-react-app/issues/821). So, to get the bundled js filenames for a production build, in PHP, you can just traverse the build/static/js directory and output one <script> tag per .js file you find. (It may be wasteful to always request all chunks, but I haven't yet taken the time to look into the right way to do it.)
Development mode looks for chunks under the wrong path
But in development mode, which is your actual question, it is handled a bit differently. The index.html served by the dev server only loads three scripts initially: bundle.js, vendors~main.chunk.js and main.chunk.js. The other chunks are loaded dynamically. You can try embedding those three scripts on your Wordpress page, but you will find that at runtime, the 'bootstrap' code generated by Webpack looks for the chunks at the wrong URL, using e.g. localhost instead of localhost:3000, resulting in a chunk loading error.
PUBLIC_URL and "homepage" don't work in development mode
According to the Create-React-App documentation and various other answers on this site, you're supposed to be able to use the environment variable PUBLIC_URL or the key "homepage" in package.json to override the hostname and port where the JS code is served so that the chunks will load, but these settings don't do anything in development mode. This is an open issue in create-react-app: https://github.com/facebook/create-react-app/issues/9001
Workaround using npx patch-package
You might think you are in trouble and will have to eject your project and modify the webpack configuration yourself to get this working. But fortunately, there is a workaround described here in a comment by SergeyVolynkin which solves the problem without ejecting, using npx patch-package to patch react-dev-utils:
https://github.com/facebook/create-react-app/issues/9001#issuecomment-838370686
What SergeyVolynkin does not mention is that, after creating the patch and checking it into VCS, you should set up patch-package in your package.json so that the patches will be applied by npm / yarn when you run yarn / npm install. See the documentation for patch-package here: https://github.com/ds300/patch-package#set-up
Summary
After applying SergeyVolynkin's patch, I was able to get the development build embedded in my PHP app. I used the following scripts in my package.json:
"scripts": {
"start": "PORT=1234 PUBLIC_URL=http://localhost:1234 WDS_SOCKET_PORT=1234 react-scripts start",
"postinstall": "patch-package"
}
And I used the following lines in the HTML served by my PHP app:
<script src="http://localhost:1234/static/js/bundle.js"></script>
<script src="http://localhost:1234/static/js/vendors~main.chunk.js"></script>
<script src="http://localhost:1234/static/js/main.chunk.js"></script>
By doing this, I could embed an app created using create-react-app in dev mode in my PHP app.