Write HTML documents with custom tags and render them with your React components.
Renderdoc is a static document generator. It takes an input HTML document with custom tags. You provide the React components that implement the tags. The output file is the rendered HTML.
As input, you need two things: an input HTML file, and a directory that contains some React components.
my-document.html
components/
Chapter.js
Header.js
Page.js
Here is your input file: my-document.html
<Header>My Life Story</Header>
<Chapter title="The Beginning">
It was a dark and stormy night.
</Chapter>In the components directory, you have these React components:
// components/Chapter.js
import React from 'react';
export default function Chapter({ title, children }) {
return (
<div className="Chapter">
<h2>{title}</h2>
{children}
</div>
);
}// components/Header.js
import React from 'react';
export default function Header({ children }) {
return <h1 className="Header">{children}</h1>;
}// components/Page.js
import React from 'react';
export default function Page({ children }) {
return (
<html>
<head>
<meta charSet="utf-8" />
</head>
<body>{children}</body>
</html>
);
}Run renderdoc on the source file. The components directory will be automatically used to load the components.
$ renderdoc my-document.htmlThe rendered output file:
<!doctype html>
<html>
<head>
<meta charSet="utf-8" />
</head>
<body>
<h1 class="Header">My Life Story</h1>
<div class="Chapter">
<h2>The Beginning</h2>
It was a dark and stormy night.
</div>
</body>
</html>- The HTML input must be well-formed XML. Every tag must be closed or self-closing.
- The tags are case sensitive (that's because they're loaded by filename from the
componentsdirectory) - You need to supply a parent component to act as a wrapper. To render a HTML page, you probably want a component that renders a
<html>element with the children wrapped in a<body> - The final output will be prepended with
<!doctype html>unless you disable this feature.
This tutorial will show you how to build a simple website with Renderdoc.
Renderdoc has simple defaults. Here are the default directories and what they're for:
- Put HTML pages into the
pagesdirectory. They can be nested in sub-directories. - Put assets in the
publicdirectory and they will be copied to the build directory as-in. Use this for stylesheets, images, and other static files. - Put React components into the
componentsdirectory. They will be loaded automatically and used to render custom tags in your pages. - The
builddirectory is where Renderdoc will generate the output. You can serve thebuilddirectory with a static server.
Next, you need a layout component. Renderdoc uses this component to wrap each page. The layout component's responsibility is typically to render the <html>, <head> and <body> tags that are standard for any HTML page, wrapping the page content.
By default, Renderdoc looks for a layout component called Page at components/Page.js. You can specify a different layout component for all pages or specific ones.