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

The need for isolated component development


Isolating React components during development can be difficult. Often, the only context available to developers and the React components that they're making is the application itself. Rarely do things go exactly as planned while a component is being developed. Part of the debug process for a React component is, well, playing with it.

I often find myself doing weird things in application code to accommodate for temporary changes that we make to components as I troubleshoot problems. For example, I'll change the type of container element to see if this is what's causing the layout issues that I'm seeing; or, I'll change the markup that's internal to the component; or, I'll completely fabricate some state or props that the component uses.

The point is that there are random experiments that you're going to want to perform over the course of developing component. Trying to do this within the application that you're building can be cumbersome. This is...