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

Summary


In this chapter, you learned about why type-checking your React code matters. You also learned about Flow—the tool used to type-check React code. Type-checking is important for React applications because it removes the need to perform runtime checks of values in the majority of cases. This is because Flow is able to statically follow code paths and determine whether everything is being used as intended.

Then, you installed Flow locally to a React application and learned how to run it. Next, you learned the basics of validating property and state values of React components. Then you learned how to validate function types and how to enforce child React component types.

Flow can be used in create-react-app dev server, but you have to eject first. In future versions of create-react-app, there will likely be better integrated support for running Flow as part of the dev server. Another option is to install a Flow plugin in a code editor such as Atom, and have errors displayed right in front...