A new blessed “getting started” experience for building SPAs in React that we can actually ship.
Make it easy to get started with React.
- We hide a small curated set of tools behind a CLI with zero configuration. The scope is very limited: we intentionally offer the minimal tools we think are useful, and we don't allow any addons or feature creep.
- We let you exit the "getting started" experience at any time. A single CLI command removes the dependency on React CLI and replaces it with real Webpack/ESLint/Babel configs and commands. You are on your own now.
- We promote the hell out of it on in the docs. This is built by the team so people trust it.
This is a hard constraint. We are committed to having zero configuration in the project.
If you use react-cli, you should have src/index.js, your bundle will be compiled to dist/, and it will run at http://localhost:3000 in development. You can’t change this.
It will have Babel, ESLint, Autprefixr and some other stuff we think it useful for getting started, but you won’t be exposed to it, and won’t be able to configure it. We curate the setup completely.
You can say goodbye to react-cli at any time. Type react-cli export, and it will create the configs and replace the generated scripts in package.json with the equivalent "real thing" (e.g. webpack-dev-server and webpack calls). You're on your own now.
This is why "zero configuration" can work as a constraint. We can punt on many real-world features (code splitting, Google Analytics, custom Babel plugins) because we let you leave the "getting started" experience any time.
This makes React CLI a feasible way to get started with a "real" React project without learning the tools. Once you export, you can't go back.
It works like react-native-cli. There is just one thing in your devDependencies, and it hides Babel, ESLint, and all the other stuff. But as I wrote above, you can react-cli export at any time.
