/fuse-box-create-react-app

Create React apps with no build configuration, with FuseBox

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FuseBox Create React App

Create React apps and components with no build configuration, with FuseBox. [FEBRUARY 2017] Forked from the Facebook Incubator version that to use FuseBox instead of webpack. [MARCH 2017] Added equivalent ability to create components instead of apps, with React Storybook pre-integrated for testing / showcasing the use of a component without the need for any additional host app

Create React App works on macOS, Windows, and Linux.

Contributors

This was a quick fork of Facebook's great work to use the very fast FuseBox transpiler.

If you'd like to take over the project please feel free to request as it's not on our long term roadmap, but there was a gap and we needed it!

tl;dr

npm install -g fuse-box-create-react-app

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

or using original Facebook create-react-app

npm install -g create-react-app

create-react-app my-app --scripts-version fuse-box-react-scripts
cd my-app/
npm start

or to force using Facebook webpack scripts after installing this version

npm install -g fuse-box-create-react-app

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

or to create a re-usable React Component with demo pages already setup using React Storybook

npm install -g fuse-box-create-react-app

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

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

npm start

Getting Started

Installation

Install it once globally:

npm install -g fuse-box-create-react-app

You’ll need to have Node >= 6 on your machine to satisfy FuseBox dependencies.

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 FuseBox 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 transitive dependencies:

my-app/
  README.md
  node_modules/
  package.json
  .gitignore
  public/
    favicon.ico
    index.html
  src/
    App.css
    App.js
    App.test.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:

Creating a Component

To create a new component, run:

create-react-component my-componennt
cd my-componennt

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

my-app/
  README.md
  node_modules/
  package.json
  .gitignore
  .npmignore
  src/
    __stories__
    ComponentA
      ComponentA.css
      ComponentA.js
      ComponentA.test.js
      logo.svg
    public
    index.js

No configuration or complicated folder structures, just the files you need to build your component and showcase it to the world with React Storybook.
Once the installation is done, you can run some commands inside the project folder:

npm start or yarn 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.

Build errors

npm test or yarn test

Runs the test watcher in an interactive mode.
By default, runs tests related to files changes since the last commit.

Read more about testing.

npm run build or yarn 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!

npm run deploy or yarn deploy (for components only)

Run this after npm run build.

Deploys the storybook static pages for production to the gh-pages branch.

User Guide

The User Guide includes information on different topics, such as:

A copy of the user guide will be created as README.md in your project folder.

How to Update to New Versions?

Please refer to the User Guide for this and other information.

Philosophy

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

  • Convention over Configuration: You don't need to configure anything by default. Reasonably good configuration of 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, ES6, and Flow syntax 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. 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 transitive dependencies (FuseBox, 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.
  • Some experimental syntax extensions (e.g. decorators).
  • CSS Modules.
  • Importing LESS or Sass directly (but you still can use them).
  • 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:

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

Contributing

We'd love to have your helping hand on create-react-app! See CONTRIBUTING.md for more information on what we're looking for and how to get started.

Acknowledgements

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

Alternatives

If you don’t agree with the choices made in this project, you might want to explore alternatives with different tradeoffs.
Some of the more popular and actively maintained ones are:

Notable alternatives also include:

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