Book Image

React 16 Tooling

By : Adam Boduch, Christopher Pitt
Book Image

React 16 Tooling

By: Adam Boduch, Christopher Pitt

Overview of this book

React 16 Tooling covers the most important tools, utilities, and libraries that every React developer needs to know — in detail. As React has grown, the amazing toolset around it has also grown, adding features and enhancing the development workflow. Each of these essential tools is presented in a practical manner and in a logical order mirroring the development workflow. These tools will make your development life simpler and happier, enabling you to create better and more performant apps. Adam starts with a hand-picked selection of the best tools for the React 16 ecosystem. For starters, there’s the create-react-app utility that’s officially supported by the React team. Not only does this tool bootstrap your React project for you, it also provides a consistent and stable framework to build upon. The premise is that when you don’t have to think about meta development work, more focus goes into the product itself. Other React tools follow this same approach to automating and improving your development life. Jest makes unit testing quicker. Flow makes catching errors easier. Docker containers make deployment in a stack simpler. Storybook makes developing components straightforward. ESLint makes writing standardized code faster. The React DevTools plugin makes debugging a cinch. React 16 Tooling clears away the barriers so you can focus on developing the good parts. In this book, we’ll look at each of these powerful tools in detail, showing you how to build the perfect React ecosystem to develop your apps within.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
2
Efficiently Bootstrapping React Applications with Create React App
Index

Installing and initializing Flow


Before you can start implementing type-safe React components, you need to install and initialize Flow. I'll show you how this is done with a create-react-app environment, but the same steps can be followed for almost any React environment.

You can install Flow globally, but I would recommend installing it locally, along with all the other packages that your project depends on. Unless there's a good reason to install something globally, install it locally. This way, anyone installing your application can get every dependency by running npm install.

To install Flow locally, run the following command:

npm install flow-bin --save-dev

This will install the Flow executable locally to your project and will update your package.json so that Flow is installed as a dependency of your project. Now let's add a new command to package.json so that you can run the Flow type checker against your source code. Make the scripts section look like this:

"scripts": { 
  "start": "react...