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 React tooling that is available directly through the web browser. The tool of choice here is a Chrome/Firefox extension called React Developer Tools. This extension adds React-specific capabilities to the browsers native developer tools. After you installed the extension, you learned how to select React elements and how to search for React elements by tag name.

Next, you looked at the properties and state values of the selected React component in React Developer Tools. These values are kept up to date automatically, as they're changed by your application. You then learned how to directly manipulate element state directly within the browser. The limitation here being that you can't add or remove values from collections.

Finally, you learned how to profile your React component performance within the browser. This isn't a React Developer Tools feature, but something the develop build of React 16 does automatically. Using profiles like these allows you...