Create Project spa-editor-project

Open up a command line terminal and enter the following Maven command:

mvn -B org.apache.maven.plugins:maven-archetype-plugin:3.2.1:generate \
 -D archetypeGroupId=com.adobe.aem \
 -D archetypeArtifactId=aem-project-archetype \
 -D archetypeVersion=35 \
 -D appTitle="WKND SPA React" \
 -D appId="wknd-spa-react" \
 -D artifactId="aem-guides-wknd-spa.react" \
 -D groupId="com.adobe.aem.guides.wkndspa.react" \
 -D frontendModule="react" \
 -D aemVersion="cloud"

Notice the frontendModule=react property. This tells the AEM Project Archetype to bootstrap the project with a starter React code base to be used with the AEM SPA Editor. Properties like appTitle, appId, artifactId, and groupId are used to identify the project and purpose.

A full list of available properties for configuring a project can be found here.

The following folder and file structure is generated by the Maven archetype on your local file system:

|--- aem-guides-wknd-spa.react/
    |--- LICENSE
    |--- README.md
    |--- all/
    |--- archetype.properties
    |--- core/
    |--- dispatcher/
    |--- it.tests/
    |--- pom.xml
    |--- ui.apps/
    |--- ui.apps.structure/
    |--- ui.config/
    |--- ui.content/
    |--- ui.frontend/
    |--- ui.tests /
    |--- .gitignore

Each folder represents an individual Maven module. In this tutorial we will primarily be working with the ui.frontend module, which is the React app. More details about individual modules can be found in the AEM Project Archetype documentation.

Ensure an instance of AEM is running locally on port 4502.

From the command line navigate into the aem-guides-wknd-spa.react project directory.

$ cd aem-guides-wknd-spa.react

Run the following command to build and deploy the entire project to AEM:

$ mvn clean install -PautoInstallSinglePackage

The build will take around a minute and should end with the following message:

...
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] Reactor Summary for aem-guides-wknd-spa.react 1.0.0-SNAPSHOT:
[INFO]
[INFO] aem-guides-wknd-spa.react .......................... SUCCESS [  0.257 s]
[INFO] WKND SPA React - Core .............................. SUCCESS [ 12.553 s]
[INFO] WKND SPA React - UI Frontend ....................... SUCCESS [01:46 min]
[INFO] WKND SPA React - Repository Structure Package ...... SUCCESS [  1.082 s]
[INFO] WKND SPA React - UI apps ........................... SUCCESS [  8.237 s]
[INFO] WKND SPA React - UI content ........................ SUCCESS [  5.633 s]
[INFO] WKND SPA React - UI config ......................... SUCCESS [  0.234 s]
[INFO] WKND SPA React - All ............................... SUCCESS [  0.643 s]
[INFO] WKND SPA React - Integration Tests ................. SUCCESS [ 12.377 s]
[INFO] WKND SPA React - Dispatcher ........................ SUCCESS [  0.066 s]
[INFO] WKND SPA React - UI Tests .......................... SUCCESS [  0.074 s]
[INFO] WKND SPA React - Project Analyser .................. SUCCESS [ 31.287 s]
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] BUILD SUCCESS
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Maven profile autoInstallSinglePackage compiles the individual modules of the project and deploys a single package to the AEM instance. By default this package is deployed to an AEM instance running locally on port 4502 and with the credentials of admin:admin.

Navigate to Package Manager on your local AEM instance: http://localhost:4502/crx/packmgr/index.jsp.

You should see multiple packages prefixed with aem-guides-wknd-spa.react.

AEM Package Manager

All of the custom code needed for the project is bundled into these packages and installed on the AEM environment.

Navigate to the Sites console: http://localhost:4502/sites.html/content.

The WKND SPA includes a basic site structure with a country, language and home page. This hierarchy is based on the archetype’s default values for language_country and isSingleCountryWebsite. These values can be overwritten by updating the available properties when generating a project.

Open the us > en > WKND SPA React Home Page page by selecting the page and clicking the Edit button in the menu bar:

A Text component has already been added to the page. You can edit this component like any other component in AEM.

Add an additional Text component to the page.

Notice that the authoring experience is similar to that of a traditional AEM Sites page. Currently a limited number of components are available to be used. More is added over the course of the tutorial.

In the Page Editor, click the Page Information button > View as Published:

This will open a new tab with the query parameter ?wcmmode=disabled which effectively turns off the AEM editor: http://localhost:4502/content/wknd-spa-react/us/en/home.html?wcmmode=disabled

View the page’s source and notice that the text content Hello World or any of the other content is not found. Instead you should see HTML like the following:

...
<body>
    <noscript>You need to enable JavaScript to run this app.</noscript>
    <div id="spa-root"></div>
    <script type="text/javascript" src="/etc.clientlibs/wknd-spa-react/clientlibs/clientlib-react.lc-xxxx-lc.min.js"></script>
</body>
...

clientlib-react.min.js is the React SPA that is loaded on to the page and responsible for rendering the content.

However, where does the content come from?

Return to the tab: http://localhost:4502/content/wknd-spa-react/us/en/home.html?wcmmode=disabled

Open the browser’s developer tools and inspect the network traffic of the page during a refresh. View the XHR requests:

There should be a request to http://localhost:4502/content/wknd-spa-react/us/en.model.json. This contains all of the content, formatted in JSON, that will drive the SPA.

In a new tab open http://localhost:4502/content/wknd-spa-react/us/en.model.json

The request en.model.json represents the content model that will drive the application. Inspect the JSON output and you should be able to find the snippet representing the Text component(s).

...
":items": {
    "text": {
        "text": "<p>Hello World! Updated content!</p>\r\n",
        "richText": true,
        ":type": "wknd-spa-react/components/text"
    },
    "text_98796435": {
        "text": "<p>A new text component.</p>\r\n",
        "richText": true,
        ":type": "wknd-spa-react/components/text"
    },
}
...

In the next chapter we will inspect how this JSON content is mapped from AEM Components to SPA Components to form the basis of the AEM SPA Editor experience.