create-react-app is a React app boilerplate generator created by Facebook. It provides a development environment configured for ease-of-use with minimal setup, including:

• ES6 and JSX transpilation
• Dev server with hot module reloading
• Code linting
• CSS auto-prefixing
• Build script with JS, CSS and image bundling, and sourcemaps
• Jest testing framework

Installation

First, install create-react-app globally with node package manager (npm).

npm install -g create-react-app

Then run the generator in your chosen directory.

create-react-app my-app

Navigate to the newly created directory and run the start script.

cd my-app/
npm start

Configuration

create-react-app is intentionally non-configurable by default. If non-default usage is required, for example, to use a compiled CSS language such as Sass, then the eject command can be used.

npm run eject

This allows editing of all configuration files. N.B. this is an irreversible process.

Alternatives

Alternative React boilerplates include: