reactjs - What's a good way to navigate code base and find source for a webpage

Question

I'm new to frontend development and thinking about what's a good way to find source code in our code base for a webpage. What I usually do is going to the element tab in chrome dev tool, finding a special class name, and searching that in code base to locate the file. I feel there should be better way for this task. I tried to use source tab in dev tool, but it shows tons of files and folders in navigation column. I also tried to use Components tab since we're using react, but component names are minified to single letters. So want to get suggestions from you folks. How do you usually do this? Thanks!

Answer 1

You have the right idea, the problem is that you are looking at the minified (presumably production) version of the website. In general, while developing a website, you run a development server, in which all of the code (mostly) appears as it is written in your IDE/editor. That way you can find component names and inspect the source code through the chrome dev tools.

You should talk to whoever is currently responsible for the code to help you get a development server running on your machine. Then, you find the component names and then do a "find in files" search through your IDE/editor to see what they are, and where they are used in the code base. There may be many results that you have to sift through. That's par for the course in large code bases until you become more familiar with what goes where. And even afterwards.

I will say; even things that appear simple can be fiendishly complex, so it would be useful for you if the owner of the code could give you a rough outline of how things are organised and why to make navigating the code base easier. But, it will always be a bit hard, and depending on how clean the code is, it might be nearly impenetrable. Good luck.