React SPA — Gold Standard¶

This is the reference standard for one application archetype: a React app that is client-rendered and served as static files — no server-side rendering, no server of its own. Data comes from external APIs or a platform SDK; the whole app compiles to a folder of static assets behind a CDN.

It exists to be judged against. VibeCode QA detects a repo's archetype, loads the matching standard, and scores the code against its rules. A human reading a review sees "fails R-BUILD-2 — assets use absolute base" and can click straight to the clause.

When this standard applies¶

A repo is a react-spa when all of these hold:

• react + react-dom are dependencies, and
• a browser bundler is present (vite, webpack, esbuild), and
• no server framework is present — no next, nuxt, sveltekit, remix, react-router's framework/SSR mode, express, hono, or fastify, and
• the build output is static (dist/ of HTML/JS/CSS served by a CDN or host worker).

If a server renders the HTML, it is not this archetype — see the sibling react-ssr standard. If there is a backend service in the same repo, that part is judged by node-service. Language, testing, accessibility, and security rules that apply to every archetype live in the cross-cutting standards and are layered on top.

The archetype in one table¶

The choices above are prescriptions inside the standard, not the boundary of it. Swapping Tailwind for CSS Modules does not change the archetype — it changes one rule's verdict. The boundary is React + client-rendered + static-hosted.

Editions¶

Best practice for this archetype moves when the ecosystem moves (a React major, a Vite major, a new consensus) — not on a fixed calendar. So editions are versioned on change, and each carries a review date so it can't silently rot.

vcqa pins an edition (react-spa@v1) and surfaces the review date as a staleness signal: "judged against a standard last verified N months ago."

FreeDocStore publishes one such standard per archetype (react-spa, react-ssr, vue-spa, node-service, flutter-app, …). Each is the gold standard a scanner judges that archetype against.