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Kristen Kinnear-Ohlmann
Kristen Kinnear-Ohlmann

Posted on • Originally published at kristenkinnearohlmann.dev

Basic Setup for Create React App

One of the things I find most valuable is a good quick-start guide. This is the guide I put together to get a React app started and pushed to GitHub, using the Bash terminal in VS Code.

  • In the terminal, navigate to the folder on your machine where you want to keep the local copy of your repo.
  • Use create-react-app to create the new application, replacing <app-name> for your application's name. Additional documentation is available at reactjs.org.
npx create-react-app <app-name>
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  • Once the application has been created, create a main branch (current GitHub default and preferred name) and delete the master branch (still the current default for create-react-app).
git checkout -b main
git branch -d master
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  • To use npm instead of yarn, take the following steps:
    • Delete yarn.lock
    • Delete node_modules folder
    • Reinstall node_modules using npm
   npm install
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  • Clean up the generated README, removing application boilerplate and adding any content desired for the first commit.
  • Test the basic React setup and enjoy the spinning React logo!
npm run start
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React tab
React logo

  • Commit code locally.
git add .
git commit -m "Initial commit"
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  • Go to your account on GitHub and create the remote repo:
    • Use the same name used for the app creation
    • Don't choose to add any of the options for initializing the repo to avoid conflicts pushing the local repo; local already has README and .gitignore from the app creation and the license can be added later
    • Use the instructions from …or push an existing repository from the command line to link the local repo to the remote location; example code below, the code generated by GitHub will contain the correct values
   git remote add origin https://github.com/<GitHub user name>/<repo name>.git
   git branch -M main
   git push -u origin main
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  • The basic React app is now ready for further development!

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