- The App Center SDK uses a modular architecture so you can use any or all of the services. Let's get started with setting up App Center React Native SDK in your app to use App Center Analytics and App Center Crashes. Before you begin, make sure that the following prerequisites are met.
- If you want to create new react app then $ npm install create-react-app If an error occurs create-react-app: command not found then install with -g, it happens because node is installed globally and it is not getting the node in local $ npm install -g create-react-app $ create-react-app appname $ cd appname appname$ npm start.
Create React App is a great tool for getting a React application up and running. It's a little less clear when you're building or prototyping an application that requires a server side component, like generating access tokens for Twilio Video or Chat, though. I've found it easiest to work with a server within the same project so that you can start everything up with one command.
By the end of this post you will learn how to set up an Express server that runs alongside a React app. If you can't wait then you can jump straight into the starter project on GitHub.
Create react application using create-react-app hello-react command as shown below. This command creates a new folder named hello-react and creates all the files and setups the necessary libraries within this folder and makes the react project ready to be executed without any additional configuration.
How it works
There is an option that you can set in Create React App's
package.json
that proxies non text/html
requests through to an alternative back end. You can use this feature to proxy to applications running elsewhere, but today we want to be able to run a server within the React project itself.We'll pull together a few npm modules that will make it possible to run one command to run our React app and an Express server at the same time so we can proxy to it.
Getting started
To follow along with the rest of this post, you will need Node.js and npm installed.
Start by creating a new React app with Create React App. Did you know, you don't have to globally install the
create-react-app
package to do this? Instead, you can run:Under the hood,
npm init
takes an initializer name, prepends create-
to it and uses npx to install and run the command.Run the new React application to make sure it was generated properly.
If you see a spinning React logo, then we're good to go.
Adding a server
We'll add our server dependencies to the
devDependencies
of our React app as they aren't part of building the front end.Stop the server with
Cmd/Ctrl + C
and use npm
to install Express and Body Parser:Add the following dependencies to help us run the front end and server together:
- node-env-run - Dominik's module for loading environment variables from a config file in development
- nodemon - for automatically restarting the server when it changes
- npm-run-all - for running multiple npm scripts at the same time
- express-pino-logger and pino-colada - for better server logging
Create a file called
.env
in the project directory to store our environment variables. Mac zip app store. We don't need to add anything to it just yet, but it will be useful later for including any credentials we need for the server, like API keys.Next, in the project directory create a new directory called
server
and a server/index.js
file. We'll create a small application that we can test with. Add the following code in server/index.js
:Open
package.json
and in the 'scripts'
object add a new script to run the server using node-env-run
and nodemon
:Test that the server is running correctly by running the script:
Create React App Macos
Open http://localhost:3001/api/greeting to test. You should see a JSON response with a 'Hello World!' greeting. Try adding a query parameter called
name
to the URL and see what you get.Running the server and the React app
To run both the server and React application at the same time we need to add a couple more things to
package.json
.First, we are going to set up the proxy to our server. Add the
'proxy'
key to package.json
. We've already set our server to run on port 3001, so point the proxy at localhost:3001.We need a script to run both the server and the front end at the same time. We will use
npm-run-all
for this. Since we are going to be running two scripts at the same time we want to use the parallel mode. npm-run-all
gives us a handy shortcut for this with the run-p
command.Add the following to the
'scripts'
section in package.json
:Run
npm run dev
and both the React application and the server will start up. However, we now can't load localhost:3000/api/greeting in the browser because the Create React App proxy will just respond with the base HTML.Let's test it from within a component in our React app instead.
Using the proxied server from React
We're going to add a form to the
App
component that will use the /api/greeting
component to form a greeting and show it on the page. Add the following constructor and functions to the App component in src/App.js
:And add this form to the JSX in the
render
function:Open the React app in the browser, fill in your name and submit. The greeting shows that your React app is now talking to your proxied server.
This is only the start
Create React App does a great job of getting a React application started, but if you need a server side component too, it can be fiddly. In this post you've seen how to use the
proxy
option and run an Express server alongside using tools like npm-run-all
.You can check out all the code from this post in this GitHub repo and use it as a jumping off point if you want to build a React app with an Express API. As a bonus, if you want to create a Twilio Video or Twilio Chat application with React, the Twilio branch is set to return access tokens for either. Just follow the instructions in the README.
Using this template, building React applications backed by an Express server is quicker and easier. I hope it gives you a good platform for building your own ideas; I can't wait to see what you build!
Lets create your first React App using create-react-app. Here we will go through all steps required to build a React App.
Create React App Mac Terminal
Follow the instructions shown to create your first React App Best productivity apps 2018 mac.
- Download nodejs from below : https://nodejs.org/en/download/
- After downloading and installing nodejs open command prompt and run below command
windows users :npm install create-react-app -g
Mac or linux users :sudo npm install create-react-app -g
- The project will be installed globally with npm(nodes package manager), npm comes with nodejs, and it is useful for managing third party JavaScript packages. -g is for globally installing the app, so that you can use this app globally on your machine and can use this command from anywhere on your machine.
- Now the create-react-app is installed on your machine globally.
- Now you can use command
create-react-app
to create new React project like below. Before running the below command navigate to the location where you want to create your first react project.
$ create-react-app projectdebug-react-guide –-scripts-version 1.1.5 - ‘create-react-app’ is a command used for creating a new react project
‘projectdebug-react-guide’
is a project name of your choice.‘--scripts-version 1.1.5’
is optional and I added it to make your project folder structure same as mine because the structure may change with new updates. This does not impact the version of react being used in a project. This impacts the structure of your project.
Once you run this command your project will be created like below, I am using Microsoft VSCode but you can use any code editor.
- Also after running the command to create your react project a folder will be created, for me the name of the folder will be ‘projectdebug-react-guide’, navigate to this folder using your command prompt using command ‘cd’
$ cd projectdebug-react-guide
Create React App Mac Os
- Now run below command
npm start
this starts a development server, it will open a new tab in your web browser. If this command is unable to open a new browser tab. You can type below address in browser to see webpage for your brand new react app http://localhost:3000/
Please note if you close the command prompt, the development server will be stopped and your pages will not be loaded. So keep it running so that background processes for development server keeps running and your webpages will be loaded automatically, any change you make to your code will be loaded automatically without hitting the refresh button.
Create A New React App
Folder structure of yournew react project
There are lot of filesand directories in our project, we will talk about the most important ones, wewill need these files in future to edit in various scenarios
- Package.json : general dependicies used by the project are mentioned in this file. These are created by create-react-app. There is a list of scripts mentioned in this file. You can run these scripts with npm run and then the script name.
- Node_modules folder : holds all the dependencies and sub dependencies of our projects. Be careful about node_modoles folder. You shouldn’t be editing anything from this folder.
- Public folder : it’s the root which is served by the webserver. Inside this folder you have index.html file. This is the only html file and we don’t need to any other html again to our project. If you want to create multiple page application then you will have to create multiple react projects.
- Manifest.json : metadata about our project
- Index.js : renders the react app