An exciting new development in the React world last week! Create React App is the official new tool from Facebook for generating a starter React project. It’s quick to install and try out, and gets you going without any complicated build setup.
Another awesome thing about Create React App is that it’s minimal. It doesn’t prescribe a set of dependencies on you, like many boilerplate projects do. When you’re ready for Redux, React Router, or whatever else, you can npm install
it yourself and have complete control.
The tool is squarely aimed toward beginners to React who are so often overwhelmed by all the setup required just to get a basic build working.
Quick Start
Install the tool with npm and the -g
flag (for “install globally”).
This gives you the create-react-app
command, which you then run to generate a project:
Wait a little while as it installs a bunch of dependencies. You don’t have to set them up, but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist…
It generates a fairly minimal set of files:
You can actually pare this down even further. The minimal set of required files is this:
Though if you do delete those other files, you’ll want to replace the code in index.js
with something of your own. Here’s a minimal example:
All that’s left is to run it. From within the project directory, just run:
A browser pops appears. “Hello Awesomeness!” indeed.
Learning React can be a struggle — so many libraries and tools!
My advice? Ignore all of them :)
For a step-by-step approach, check out my Pure React workshop.
Learn to think in React
- 90+ screencast lessons
- Full transcripts and closed captions
- All the code from the lessons
- Developer interviews
Dave Ceddia’s Pure React is a work of enormous clarity and depth. Hats off. I'm a React trainer in London and would thoroughly recommend this to all front end devs wanting to upskill or consolidate.