redux-saga is a library to manage side effects in your application. It works
beautifully for data fetching, concurrent computations and a lot more.
Sebastien Lorber put it best:
Imagine there is widget1 and widget2. When some button on widget1 is clicked, then it should have an effect on widget2. Instead of coupling the 2 widgets together (ie widget1 dispatch an action that targets widget2), widget1 only dispatch that its button was clicked. Then the saga listen for this button click and then update widget2 by dispaching a new event that widget2 is aware of.
This adds a level of indirection that is unnecessary for simple apps, but make it more easy to scale complex applications. You can now publish widget1 and widget2 to different npm repositories so that they never have to know about each others, without having them to share a global registry of actions. The 2 widgets are now bounded contexts that can live separately. They do not need each others to be consistent and can be reused in other apps as well. The saga is the coupling point between the two widgets that coordinate them in a meaningful way for your business.
Note: It is well worth reading the source of this quote in its entirety!
To learn more about this amazing way to handle concurrent flows, start with the
official documentation and explore
some examples! (read this comparison if you're used to redux-thunk)
To generate a new saga, use the $ npm run generate saga command. This will
create a new file in the app/sagas folder, in which you can write your saga.
Don't like this feature? Click here