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

Automating code formatting with Prettier


ESLint can be used to improve any aspect of your code, including how it's formatted. The problem with using something like ESLint for this job is that it only tells you about the formatting issues that it finds. You still have to go fix them.

This is why the ESLint configuration from create-react-app doesn't specify any code formatting rules. This is where a tool like Prettier comes in. It's an opinionated code formatter for your JavaScript code. It understands JSX out of the box, so it's ideally suited to format your React components.

The create-react-app user guide has a whole section on setting up Git commit hooks that trigger Prettier to format any code before it's committed: https://github.com/facebookincubator/create-react-app#user-guide.

I won't repeat this guide here, but the basic idea is that having Git hooks in place that invoke Prettier on any JavaScript source that's committed will ensure that everything is formatted, well, pretty. The downside...