Investigate use of create-react-app for React tutorial

[DanielRosenwasser]

Recently, the utility create-react-app was made to facilitate starting up a new React project.

It's worth investigating what the utility does specifically. If it's very minimal, and easy to configure afterwards, we can consider using it for our React tutorial.

[DanielRosenwasser]

@wmonk just checked out your react-scripts-ts fork - it looks really solid, so I think we might just use it. 👍

[wmonk]

That's awesome!

Will give me a push to add some more documentation.

Anything I can do to help make it more user friendly?

[DanielRosenwasser]

Right now the npm package doesn't have updates to the README, but other than that I think my only two other concerns are

• The Webpack docs might have to be separated out. (probably appropriate anyway)
• For more complex workflows, we might be leaving other users out of the rain. If that's the case, we can keep things mostly how they are, and refer them to the script if they want something way faster.

For the record, most of the office is out (and I'm on vacation) so we might have to circle back to this later on, but I wanted to ping you and get your thoughts on the matter. 😄

[wmonk]

hey @DanielRosenwasser back to full time work now, so can help properly 😄

What can I do to help with this? Are you proposing to change the existing react/webpack guide to just use react-scripts-ts?

[DanielRosenwasser]

That's mainly it, though I haven't gotten around to it since I'm still sort of on vacation.

Part of this is that I have to really sit down and try out the workflow. Our users have asked for more comprehensive and prescriptive tutorials, giving details on writing tests, adding Redux and/or Mobx, etc. Unfortunately, as a guy who works on languages & compilers, front-end isn't as much my forte, so I'd need to run through the process before I try to write up a guide on those details. 😄

The way I see it is that first I'd like to convert the guide to use react-scripts-ts and have documentation on writing tests. Then we'd later revisit and add details on state management. I think we'd be willing to take contributions if you're interested, and I'd welcome any advice you have.

[wmonk]

Sounds like a good plan! I think the great thing about create-react-app is that is gives you a massive head start, without any additional complexity. E.g. you will definitely need react, but not necessarily any state management, node server, router, etc - so just leaves those things out. For this basic use case it works brilliantly, but invariably people want more on top of it.

What kind of tests are you talking about, using something like enzyme. Currently there is a single test in there, which gives some base to build on top of - although if you're not familiar with testing react components it won't be especially helpful. I can certainly help with this side of things, but am not sure exactly how you want to present the "getting started with create react app" guide.