How to use react ecosystem with rails 3.2?

Question

I just want to share with you an uncomfortable situation that I'm having right now and ask you for advice. It turns out that I'm developing a kind of old project by using rails 3.2 and ruby 2.0. Until now, as usual I've been creating the view layer with haml markup language. Recently I was assigned to implement a new set of UI requirements that seems to be a little complicated. So I was wondering if I could use the react library to do that. I'm using the react-rails gem to facilitate the integration and it works fine. But the problem comes in when I try to use a third party library like react-dropzone or react-modal or whatever react library. I have not been able to get it to work neither using rails-assets gems nor downloading directly the /dist files and require them with sprockets. Some of the errors that I get are:

typeError: undefined is not an object (evaluating 'webpack_require(3).unstable_renderSubtreeIntoContainer')

Can not find module 'react'

I don't know if I can easily setup a webpack server to compile these react libraries and then can be used along with react-rails and the specific version of rails 3.2. I've searched about the subject and I found the webpacker gem but it requires at least rails 4.2. I appreciate any comment or observation about what should I do.

Answer 1

I've finally solved my problem by using react_on_rails gem which allows an easy integration of React + Webpack + Rails, and also includes the server side rendering option.