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

Building a messaging app


It's difficult to talk about tooling used to deploy React applications without any context. For this, you'll throw together a basic messaging app. In this section, you'll see how the app works and how it is built. Then, you'll be ready for the remaining chapter sections where you'll learn how to deploy your application as a set of containers.

The basic idea of this app is to be able to login and send messages to your contacts, as well as receiving messages. We'll keep it super simple. In terms of functionality, it'll barely match SMS capabilities. In fact, that can be the app title—Barely SMS. The idea is to have a React application with enough moving parts to test out in a production setting, as well as a server that you'll be able to deploy in a container later on.

For visual appearance, we'll use the Material-UI (https://material-ui-next.com/) component library. However, the choice of UI components should not affect the lessons of this chapter.

Starting Barely SMS...