Get started with create-react-app

There have been many attempts at making starter-packs for your next React project. There was react-starter-pack, react-boilerplate, react-redux-universal-hot-example and a whole list of others.

Unfortunately, a lot of them were too complete, too complex and definitely too complex for the average project starter.

That all changed when Dan Abramov and some of his amazing colleagues at Facebook came out with create-react-app project.

The main difference between this starter pack and most of the others is that the entire Webpack and Babel configuration (as well as most other config-related stuff) has been pulled out into its own maintained package - react-scripts. This allows the maintainers to keep every dependency up to date, and release updates as non-breaking patches or minor releases.

In addition, create-react-app only sets up a very basic React app - no routing, state management or fancy server side rendering. You get the setup, testing and a service worker - that's it.

Hiding configuration might sound scary to projects that aims to grow to a certain size. If you're going to add features to your application for the foreseeable future, chances are that you might reach a point where you need some webpack configuration tweak that create-react-app doesn't provide. Luckily, there's an eject button!

Whenever you run create-react-app in your CLI, the package.json-file already has an eject task. Whenever you run this, react-scripts are removed, and instead replaced with the barebones webpack- and babel config files. This will let you expand on whatever create-react-app already set up for you, so you don't have to start from scratch just to add hot reloading, for example.

One caveat of the eject task, though - once you eject from create-react-app, you can't go back - so think thoroughly about whether that's what you want or not. Chances are, you'd be better off by forking the project on GitHub, changing whatever you need there, and switching out your react-scripts dependency with your own package. This way you can still sync your branch with the current master branch, and you'll get updates as they come along.

I hope you enjoyed today's little introduction to create-react-app and how to get started with your next project. Hopefully you'll give it a try! And I hope to see you back tomorrow, for yet another article on something cool React.