Create a React application manually with webpack

Though it is painless to get started with create-react-app to make your own React application, it is however beneficial in some cases to manually configure your own application. 'create-react-app' does a lot of things for you which may or may not meet the needs of your project. So knowing how to configure your own React application can come in handy.

Install and get this project up and running just like any other React application

npm install
npm start

Notice that in package.json, the scripts for building and starting the application use the webpack instead of the traditional react-scripts.

This application has been configured the following way through the webpack.config.js file:

• It's entry point is the file index.js
• The output of build is minified and stored in main.js
• It has an integrated devServer that runs on the port 3000 and has hot enabled which allows live reloading
• It has a source-map devtool integrated which will allow easy debugging of the application in case of errors from browser Dev Tools. For example, without source-map, you might not be able to trace the line causing error from the browser inspection panel. It will give you an unfamiliar snippet of code. source-map fixes this and shows you your familiar code inside the browser console.
• It has a few rules integrated such as loaders for babel, which will eventually transpile all code to JavaScript so it can be displayed in the browser. This allows you to code using ES6 or TypeScript. Similarly, we have a CSS loader to transpile CSS or SCSS code.

There are numerous rules that you can set in this configuration file to meet your organizational and personal needs for the project.