JavaScript
Create React apps with no build configuration.

Create React App

Create React apps with no build configuration.

tl;dr

npm install -g create-react-app

create-react-app my-app
cd my-app/
npm start

Then open http://localhost:3000/ to see your app.
When you’re ready to deploy to production, create a minified bundle with npm run build.

Getting Started

Installation

Install it once globally:

npm install -g create-react-app

You’ll need to have Node >= 4 on your machine. We recommend to use Node >= 6 and npm >= 3 for faster installation speed and better disk usage. You can use nvm to easily switch Node versions between different projects.

This tool doesn’t assume a Node backend. The Node installation is only required for the build tools that rely on it locally, such as Webpack and Babel.

Creating an App

To create a new app, run:

create-react-app my-app
cd my-app

It will create a directory called my-app inside the current folder.
Inside that directory, it will generate the initial project structure and install the transient dependencies:

my-app/
  README.md
  index.html
  favicon.ico
  node_modules/
  package.json
  src/
    App.css
    App.js
    index.css
    index.js
    logo.svg

No configuration or complicated folder structures, just the files you need to build your app.
Once the installation is done, you can run some commands inside the project folder:

npm start

Runs the app in development mode.
Open http://localhost:3000 to view it in the browser.

The page will reload if you make edits.
You will see the build errors and lint warnings in the console.

npm run build

Builds the app for production to the build folder.
It correctly bundles React in production mode and optimizes the build for the best performance.

The build is minified and the filenames include the hashes.
Your app is ready to be deployed!

How Do I?...

The generated project will include a guide in its README.
You can also read its latest version here.

Philosophy

• One Dependency: There is just one build dependency. It uses Webpack, Babel, ESLint, and other amazing projects, but provides a cohesive curated experience on top of them.

• Zero Configuration: There are no configuration files or command line options. Configuring both development and production builds is handled for you so you can focus on writing code.

• No Lock-In: You can “eject” to a custom setup at any time. Run a single command, and all the configuration and build dependencies will be moved directly into your project, so you can pick up right where you left off.

Why Use This?

If you’re getting started with React, use create-react-app to automate the build of your app. There is no configuration file, and react-scripts is the only extra build dependency in your package.json. Your environment will have everything you need to build a modern React app:

• React, JSX, and ES6 support.
• Language extras beyond ES6 like the object spread operator.
• A dev server that lints for common errors.
• Import CSS and image files directly from JavaScript.
• Autoprefixed CSS, so you don’t need -webkit or other prefixes.
• A build script to bundle JS, CSS, and images for production, with sourcemaps.

The feature set is intentionally limited. It doesn’t support advanced features such as server rendering or CSS modules. Currently, it doesn’t support testing either. The tool is also non-configurable because it is hard to provide a cohesive experience and easy updates across a set of tools when the user can tweak anything.

You don’t have to use this. Historically it has been easy to gradually adopt React. However many people create new single-page React apps from scratch every day. We’ve heard loud and clear that this process can be error-prone and tedious, especially if this is your first JavaScript build stack. This project is an attempt to figure out a good way to start developing React apps.

Converting to a Custom Setup

If you’re a power user and you aren’t happy with the default configuration, you can “eject” from the tool and use it as a boilerplate generator.

Running npm run eject copies all the configuration files and the transient dependencies (Webpack, Babel, ESLint, etc) right into your project so you have full control over them. Commands like npm start and npm run build will still work, but they will point to the copied scripts so you can tweak them. At this point, you’re on your own.

Note: this is a one-way operation. Once you eject, you can’t go back!

You don’t have to ever use eject. The curated feature set is suitable for small and middle deployments, and you shouldn’t feel obligated to use this feature. However we understand that this tool wouldn’t be useful if you couldn’t customize it when you are ready for it.

Limitations

Some features are currently not supported:

• Server rendering.
• Testing.
• Some experimental syntax extensions (e.g. decorators).
• CSS Modules.
• LESS or Sass.
• Hot reloading of components.

Some of them might get added in the future if they are stable, are useful to majority of React apps, don’t conflict with existing tools, and don’t introduce additional configuration.

What’s Inside?

The tools used by Create React App are subject to change. Currently it is a thin layer on top of many amazing community projects, such as:

• webpack with webpack-dev-server, html-webpack-plugin and style-loader
• Babel with ES6 and extensions used by Facebook (JSX, object spread, class properties)
• Autoprefixer
• ESLint
• and more.

All of them are transient dependencies of the provided npm package.

Contributing

Clone the repo and run npm install in the root and the global-cli folder.

Once it is done, you can modify any file locally and run npm start or npm run build just like in a generated project. If you want to try out the end-to-end flow with the global CLI, you can do this too:

npm run create-react-app my-app
cd my-app

and then run npm start or npm run build.

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the authors of existing related projects for their ideas and collaboration:

• @eanplatter
• @insin
• @mxstbr

Alternatives

If you don’t agree with the choices made in this project, you might want to explore alternatives with different tradeoffs:

• enclave
• nwb
• motion
• rackt-cli
• budō
• rwb
• quik
• sagui
• roc

You can also use module bundlers like webpack and Browserify directly.
React documentation includes a walkthrough on this topic.