Getting Started

1. Include Reef on your site

Reef comes in two flavors: standalone and polyfilled.

The polyfilled build uses the .polyfill suffix, and includes the polyfills for Proxies and Custom Events that are required for IE support.

CDN

The fastest way to get started is with the CDN from jsDelivr.

<script src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/reefjs/dist/reef.min.js"></script>

Reef uses semantic versioning. You can grab a major, minor, or patch version from the CDN with the @1.2.3 syntax. You can find all available versions under releases.

<!-- Use the latest major version -->
<script src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/reefjs@7/dist/reef.min.js"></script>

ES Modules

Reef also supports modern browsers and module bundlers (like Rollup, Webpack, Snowpack, and so on) using the ES modules import syntax. Use the .es version.

import Reef from 'https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/reefjs/dist/reef.es.min.js';

More ways to install Reef

Direct Download

You can download the files directly from GitHub.

Compiled and production-ready code can be found in the dist directory. The src directory contains development code.

<script src="path/to/reef.min.js"></script>

NPM

You can also use NPM (or your favorite package manager). First, install with NPM.

npm install reefjs --save

Then import the package.

import Reef from 'reefjs';

CommonJS

If you use NodeJS, you can import Reef using the require() method with the .cjs version.

var Reef = require('https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/reefjs/dist/reef.cjs.min.js');

AMD

If you use RequireJS, SystemJS, and other AMD formats, you can import Reef with the .amd version.

requirejs(['https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/reefjs/dist/reef.amd.min.js'], function (Reef) {
  //...
});

2. Add an element to render your component/UI into

This is typically an empty div with a targetable selector.

<div id="app"></div>

3. Create your component

Create a new Reef() instance, passing in two arguments: your selector, and your options.

Provide a selector

The first argument is the selector for the element you want to render the UI into. Alternatively, you can pass in the element itself.

// This works
var app = new Reef('#app');

// This does too
var elem = document.querySelector('#app');
var app = new Reef(elem);

Provide a Template

The second argument is an object of options. It requires a template property, as either a string or a function that returns a string, to render into the DOM.

You can use old-school strings or ES6 template literals.

// Your template can be a string
var app = new Reef('#app', {
	template: '<h1>Hello, world!</h1>'
});

// It can also be a function that returns a string
var app = new Reef('#app', {
	template: function () {
		return '<h1>Hello, world!</h1>';
	}
});

[Optional] Add State/Data

As an optional property of the options argument, you can include state for your component with the data property.

The data object is automatically encoded and passed into your template function, so that you can use it to customize your template.

// Some data
var app = new Reef('#app', {
	data: {
		greeting: 'Hello',
		name: 'world'
	},
	template: function (props) {
		return `<h1>${props.greeting}, ${props.name}!</h1>`;
	}
});

Template literals give you a simple, JSX-like templating experience. If you want, you can use old-school concatenated strings for more backwards compatibility.

4. Render your component

Render your component by calling the render() method on it.

app.render();

Try the demo on CodePen →

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