But the Facebook team recognized that as long as there wasn't a core-team sanctioned solution, the community was likely to remain splintered. There are loads of boilerplates and libraries to help you get started with a more advanced React setup. A well-configured environment gives you the ability to use the complete ES6 feature set as well as other bells and whistles like hot reloading. But developers starting out have many compelling reasons to want to use one. Sure, not all roads lead to a JavaScript bundler. But you'll start running into problems when you want to break up your app across files and use the ES6 module pattern or roll out browser-less unit tests.

For example, you can load babel in script tags and get JSX and ES6. While there are discrete steps you can take to enable individual advantages, you'll hit limitations with each sooner or later.

JSX, ES6, ES6 modules, hot reloading - pick your bait. However, if you're like most developers, you will be quickly lured away from these tranquil waters. All you have to do is include React and ReactDOM in some script tags: You can drop React into your production application, today. Update (): Tested and working on latest version of react-scripts.Īnyone who tells you that React is easy to get started with isn't lying. Update (): We updated the repository to be cross-platform (Mac/Unix/Windows). This post has been updated to utilize this feature. Update (): react-scripts version 0.2.3 was released, adding a proxy feature for the Webpack development server to address CORS issues in development. Check out that post if Rails is your preferred API server platform. Update (): We now have a mirror for this post that uses Rails. In this post, we detail how to use the create-react-app project along with an API server.

React express