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

Working with React elements in React Developer Tools


Once you've installed React Developer Tools in Chrome, you'll see a button in the toolbar located to the right of the browser address bar. Here's what mine looks like:

I have several buttons for browser extensions here. You can see the React Developer Tools button at the far right—the one with the React logo. When the button is greyed-out like this, it means that you're not currently on a page running a React application. Go ahead and try clicking on it while you're on some random page:

Now let's use create-react-app to create a new application, the same process you've been following throughout this book:

create-react-app finding-and-selecting-components

Now fire up the development server:

npm start

This should take you directly to the browser page with your React application loaded up in a new tab. Now the React Developer Tools button should look different:

There you go. Since you're on a page that's running a React application, the React Developer...