10 Essential Tools for React Developers

Introduction to React Development

When I first started working with React, I was overwhelmed by the number of tools available. Last quarter, our team discovered that having the right tools can make all the difference in productivity and code quality. Here's what I learned when building a large-scale React application.

1. Create React App

My colleague Jake suggested we start with Create React App. It's a great way to get started with React, as it provides a lot of features out of the box, such as code splitting, routing, and a development server. However, I realized that it only works if you also do some manual configuration for production environments.

npx create-react-app my-app

Output:

Success! Created my-app at /Users/user/projects/my-app
Inside that directory, you can run several commands:

2. Webpack

After setting up our project, we needed to configure Webpack for production. The official Webpack documentation shows the happy path, but misses some critical configuration options for large-scale applications. I spent two days debugging why our bundles were so large, only to discover that we needed to tweak the buffer sizes.

module.exports = {
  //...
  optimization: {
    splitChunks: {
      chunks: 'all',
      minSize: 10000,
      minChunks: 1,
      maxAsyncRequests: 30,
      maxInitialRequests: 30,
      enforceSizeThreshold: 50000,
    },
  },
};

3. Babel

When we deployed our application on Friday at 3 pm, we encountered an issue with older browsers. The Babel team told us that we needed to configure the @babel/preset-env plugin to include the correct polyfills. Now, our application works seamlessly across all browsers.

module.