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>

• 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

• To use npm instead of yarn, take the following steps:
  • Delete yarn.lock
  • Delete node_modules folder
  • Reinstall node_modules using npm

   npm install

• 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

• Commit code locally.

git add .
git commit -m "Initial commit"

• 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

• The basic React app is now ready for further development!