<GridStack> and <GridStackItem> are the only required building blocks. There is no separate React “provider” layer: the grid host installs GridStack’s static callbacks once (installGridStackReactCallbacks) so addRemoveCB / saveCB / updateCB behave like the Angular wrapper—dispatch through DOM back-refs (_gridComp on the grid element, _gridItemRef on items) instead of closing over per-app React state.
Recommended: define layout as JSON (options.children) plus a components map keyed by the component field on each widget, mirroring Angular’s selector + input (component + props). React content is rendered with createPortal into .grid-stack-item-content so the React tree can stay mounted across drag/reparent when the DOM node moves.
Not recommended: driving the grid purely from React with items.map(() => <GridStackItem>) as the source of truth for which widgets exist. That fights GridStack’s ownership of add/remove and external drops.
grid.save() uses GridStack.saveCB to copy component / props from engine nodes into the serialized widget. useWidgetSerializer registers per-item serialize() hooks that are merged into props during save (via mergeWidgetPropsForSave on the host API).
Public widget/options types extend the core gridstack types with optional component, props, and DOM extensions (GridHTMLElement, GridItemHTMLElement). Consumers can import from gridstack/dist/react after a build that emits dist/react/.
The previous GridStackProvider / GridStackRender / GridStackRenderProvider stack under react/lib/ has been removed in favor of this API.