Installing Create React App

The first step is installing Create React App, which is an npm package: create-react-app. This package should be installed globally because it installs a command on your system that's used to create your React projects. In other words, create-react-app isn't actually part of your React project—it's used to initialize your React project.

Here's how you can install Create React App globally:

$ npm install -g create-react-app

Notice the -g flag in the command—this makes sure that the create-react-app command is installed globally. Once the installation is complete, you can make sure that the command is good to go by running the following:

$ create-react-app -V

> 1.4.1

Now you're ready to use this tool to create your first React app!

Creating your first app

We'll spend the remainder of the chapter creating your first React application with Create React App. Don't worry, this is super easy to do, so it'll be a short chapter. The goal of Create React App is to start building...