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


This chapter was the focus of a tool called Storybook. Storybook provides React developers with a sandboxed environment that makes it easy to develop React components on their own. This can be difficult when the only environment you have is the application that you're working on. Storybook provides a level of development isolation.

First, you learned how to install the global Storybook command-line utility and how to use this utility to get Storybook set up in your create-react-app projects. Next, you learned how to write stories that show different perspectives of a component.

Then, you learned that a good portion of Storybook functionality comes from add-ons. You learned that Actions help with logging and that links provide a mechanism for navigation beyond the default. You also learned how to write documentation for React components using Storybook. We closed the chapter with a look at building static Storybook content.

In the next chapter, you'll explore the React tooling available...