Create-React-App is a utility script that:
- Creates a skeleton React project with a bunch of files and folders, already there for us, a bunch of settings configured automatically right out of the gate.
- Sets it up so that Js files are run throughout Babel automatically, so we dont have to do any configuration.
- Lets us use super-modern Javascript features/idioms.
- Things that may not be implemented across all of the browsers, but we dont have to worry about that as much if we are using create-react-app.
- Makes testing and deployment much easier so we can create a build and deploy our applications from our command line in well, a matter of seconds.
The first dependence, the thing you must have before you do anything is Node.js. Node.js is a run-time environment which includes everything you need to execute a program written in JavaScript. It’s used for running scripts on the server to render content before it is delivered to a web browser.
NPM stands for Node Package Manager, a tool that you automatically get when installing Node.js. Which makes easy to menage third party packages and guess what create-react-app is one of them.
Create React App is a comfortable environment for learning React, and is the best way to start building a new single-page application in React. It sets up your development environment so that you can use the latest JavaScript features, provides a nice developer experience, and optimizes your app for production. You’ll need to have Node >= 8.10 and npm >= 5.6 on your machine.
To create a project, run:
npx create-react-app my-app (this is the name of your application that you want to create)
cd my-app
npm start
npx on the first line is not a typo — it’s a package runner tool that comes with npm 5.2+.
Create React App doesn’t handle backend logic or databases, it just creates a frontend build pipeline, so you can use it with any backend you want. Under the hood, it uses Babel and webpack, but you don’t need to know anything about them.
Create react app official repository https://github.com/facebook/create-react-app
Here you will find installation instructions and a detail explanation what it does and how it works.