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

Installing Create React App


The first step is installing Create React App, which is an npm package: create-react-app. This package should be installed globally because it installs a command on your system that's used to create your React projects. In other words, create-react-app isn't actually part of your React project—it's used to initialize your React project.

Here's how you can install Create React App globally:

$ npm install -g create-react-app

Notice the -g flag in the command—this makes sure that the create-react-app command is installed globally. Once the installation is complete, you can make sure that the command is good to go by running the following:

$ create-react-app -V

> 1.4.1

Now you're ready to use this tool to create your first React app!

Creating your first app

We'll spend the remainder of the chapter creating your first React application with Create React App. Don't worry, this is super easy to do, so it'll be a short chapter. The goal of Create React App is to start building...