Best practice for importing component from components library in React.js

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When I create components in React, they're all in a folder called component and each component has a dedicated folder with the same name as the component itself, e.g. ../components/Input.

But a big concern is about naming files. In order to avoid having to long paths, I name the component inside the folder Index.tsx so that when I import, I'll only have ../components/Input otherwise, it would be a very ugly import path like ../components/Input/Input.

So, by naming Index.tsx, in my IDE, I end up having too much index files open and then I get lost.

So what I did was to rename all those components file with the same name as the folder Input.tsx and exporting them using named export like export const Input:React.FC<InputProps>=(props)=>{...}, then at the root of my component folder, I created one index.tsx file where I export all those components so that while importing them in my pages, I can just write import {Input} from "../components".

I like this approach, but my next concern is about tree shaking. Because I don't want to import every time the entire components library.

So with the above approach, does React handle automatically tree shaking for us?

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1 Answers

There's a tweet about the possible issues related to re-exporting everything with index files.

If your project has a components/index.js file which re-exports all your components (and does nothing else), that’s one example.

This is bad for performance – for two reasons.

  1. It makes code splitting ineffective.

    When you do

    import { Button } from './components'

    you’re importing not only Button but the whole ‘./components’ file. Which means you’re bundling the whole file – with all the components it exports.

  2. It makes bundle initialization more expensive.

    Every time a browser downloads the bundle, it has to execute it – and all its modules as well. If there’re a lot of modules, or some of them do something expensive, this can take a while.

Someone else suggests configuring webpack's sideEffects option so that the tree-shaking can still optimize the bundle as much as possible.

What I'm suggesting is to create small component modules inside the components directory.

- components/
  - Input/          # component module
    - index.ts      # exports public API
    - Input.tsx     # actual component implementation
    - Input.test.tsx
    - Input.scss
    - Input.stories.tsx
    - etc.

Where the index.ts only re-export the public API for this component.

// index.ts
export { Input } from './Input';
export type { InputProps } from './Input';
// etc.

So that we have non-repeating paths when importing, but the filename we're actually working with is named according to the component.

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