DrupalCon Dublin 2016: React Front-end For Your Drupal 8 Back-end

Drupal 8 comes bundled with support for exposing entities likes nodes, users, and comments in a RESTful manner, which have gradually become the primary source of data for a plethora of consumers, be it mobile applications, IoT devices, or even web applications running client-side frameworks.

React is an ultra-performant view library which makes it great for building interactive applications with real time data. React components makes it extremely simple to create isolated components that can be plugged together to build large scale applications. It’s component model is a great fit to model data on a webpage which is typical of a content management system. The one-way data flow helps in modelling the page directly to data received from Drupal's RESTful API and is easy to comprehend compared to conventional MVC frameworks.

In this hands-on session, you will learn how to build a decoupled website using React ecosystem on the front-end and Drupal 8 as the content management system and a data source.

Key Takeaways:

How to configure Drupal to expose RESTful resources using Drupal 8

Enable CORS support for the domains/port running our React application

Authenticate requests using JWT

Consume data on front-end using Redux store

Pass data from Redux store React components



By the end of this session, you will be able to:

Build a RESTful API using Drupal 8

Use any backend with React front-end


This session is for Drupalers who know advanced JavaScript (functional programming skills are not required) and who are familiar with the React landscape.

Drupal is a registered trademark of Dries Buytaert.