React Cookbook

Chapter 1. Creating Applications

React is a surprisingly adaptable development framework. Developers use it to create large JavaScript-heavy Single-Page Applications (SPAs) or to build surprisingly small plug-ins. You can use it to embed code inside a Rails application or generate a content-rich website.

In this chapter, we look at the various ways of creating a React application. We also look at some of the more valuable tools you might want to add to your development cycle. Few people now create their JavaScript projects from scratch. Doing so is a tedious process, involving an uncomfortable amount of tinkering and configuration. The good news is that you can use a tool to generate the code you need in almost every case.

Let’s take a whistle-stop tour of the many ways of starting your React journey, beginning with the one most frequently used: create-react-app.

1.1 Generate a Simple Application

Problem

React projects are challenging to create and configure from scratch. Not only are there numerous design choices to make—which libraries to include, which tools to use, which language features to enable—but manually created applications will, by their nature, differ from one another. Project idiosyncrasies increase the time it takes a new developer to become productive.

Solution

create-react-app is a tool for building SPAs with a standard structure and a good set of default options. Generated projects use the React Scripts library to build, test, and run the code. Projects ...