Unveiling Ignite 2
Your Co-Pilot for Building React Native Apps
We’re excited to announce the release of Ignite 2 beta! Over the past six months the Ignite team has been working hard to revamp Ignite into something even better.
Why?
We have teams of various sizes and we want this experience:
Bob: Hey, can you add maps to my React Native project for me?
Alice: Here ya go, and here’s an example map with some notes in comments.
Bob: Thanks! That’s exactly what I needed.
We’re developers, by the third time we’ve helped someone add X to their project, we knew we had to do something better.
What was Ignite 1.0?
Ignite 1.0 was a resounding success of examples jammed into one app. With over 4,000 stars on GitHub and coverage from several blog articles, Ignite was launched into React Native fame. It wasn’t the ideal experience, but it was a start.
With success, we got a lot of feedback. We learned a few things quickly:
- A kitchen sink of stuff — while useful, is always more than needed. People want to easily remove a few things to make room for their own opinions.
- Starting project-friendly practices framework is great, but as the app develops the two inevitably grow apart.
- Not every opinion can fit in a single project. Some technologies are mutually exclusive.
Curing these three things became the focus of Ignite 2.0. Our job was to convert the springboard into a co-pilot.
TADAAAA 🎉
Ignite 2.0 addresses all of our concerns head on. We wanted a light-touch plugin system that helps us write apps, and to do that we wanted to make it for everyone, not just us.
FINALLY, we can have the “let me add that for you” experience.
Our philosophy is “keep it friendly” for everyone
- No lock-in
- Unobtrusive structure
- Pure plugin architecture
You can use Ignite 2 to build an app, promote your lib with a plugin, or scrap our entire philosophy and build a boilerplate that works specific to your company’s needs.
Additionally, we don’t want to bloat. To eject from everything that’s not your app, you would just delete your ignite folder and references. That’s how easy we’ve made it.
Let’s have a tour!
Adding a Plugin
Syntax:
ignite add <plugin-name>
That’s it! All the npm/yarn installing, linking, and embedding is done. Permissions are handled if you need, and examples are added if you opted in on an example screen. Generators are added if the author supplies them.
For instance — react-native-elements has a plugin. Want to use it in your app? Just run ignite add elements in your Ignite app and suddenly you’ve got the plugin, AND you’ve got a demo in the Plugin Examples section of your app. You can click around the example and optionally remove it with a simple remove command.
Modifying a Plugin (What what wwwwhhhat!?)
Syntax:
ignite spork <plugin-name>
We have some cool generators that build from templates.
Spork It
Things like ignite generate screen PartyScreen will create a new screen for you. But what we put in a screen, might not be what you need for your project. Wouldn’t it be cool if you could customize the screen generator and make just a few small changes? Just run ignite spork and choose what templates you’d like to change! We were given an idea by Brent Vatne.
You can do this with any plugin’s generator. Once you spork a file, the template is copied, and all future generated files will use your template instead.
Or Just Fork It
If you want to do something beyond templates, you can fork the code from npm/github and then simply point at your local folder.
And we’re just getting started!
Keep up with what we’re making!
Share the official site: https://infinite.red/ignite
Star the Github repo: https://github.com/infinitered/ignite
Read some friendly docs or build a plugin!: https://github.com/infinitered/ignite/tree/master/docs
Watch me build an app in less than 15 minutes with Ignite 2!
About Gant
Gant Laborde is Chief Technology Strategist at Infinite Red, published author, adjunct professor, public speaker, and mad-scientist in training. Read the writings of Gant and his co-workers in our Red Shift publication. If you’re looking to discuss nerdy tech, he’s all ears. If you’ve got a conference, he’s happy to present.
View half-witty, half-groan technical tweets with @GantLaborde on Twitter, and follow him on Medium and GitHub. See where he’s speaking next on http://GantLaborde.com/
