Dev Blog: How Singlewire Migrated 195,000 Lines of AngularJS to React

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2022-01-13 15:30:12

Each month, we have a member from the Singlewire Software development team present a deep-dive, behind-the-scenes look at a recent project. This month, one of our software engineers, Dan, walks us through our recent move from AngularJS to React.

At Singlewire, the main customer-facing application in our InformaCast mass notification cloud offering is a single page web application (SPA) for administering our system. It was originally written in AngularJS in 2012, but we began porting it to React in August 2018. As of March 2020, we have ported 80 percent of the codebase. All our new code is in Typescript. You can see our progress in the snapshot below.

But this wasn’t a stop-the-world rewrite. In addition to removing more than 20,000 lines of code, we added more than 3000 tests across 667 test suites, added strict type checking, and delivered 22 new features.

Rewriting code and changing frameworks isn't the sort of work that companies undertake for fun, and the same was true for us. There were a number of reasons we started looking around for alternatives to AngularJS in 2018.