React 16 Tooling

Automatic dependency handling

Let's take a look at the dependencies that were installed as part of the bootstrapping process. You can list your projects packages by running npm ls --depth=0. The --depth=0 option means that you only want to see the top-level dependencies:

├── react@16.0.0 
├── react-dom@16.0.0 
└── react-scripts@1.0.14 

There isn't much here, just the two core React libraries that you need, and something called react-scripts. This latter package contains the scripts that you'll want to run with this project such as starting the development server and making a production build.

Next, let's look at the package.json file that was created by Create React App:

{ "name": "my-react-app", "version": "0.1.0", "private": true, "dependencies": ...