Loving Create React App and want to get involved? Thanks! There are plenty of ways you can help.
Please take a moment to review this document in order to make the contribution process easy and effective for everyone involved.
Following these guidelines helps to communicate that you respect the time of the developers managing and developing this open source project. In return, they should reciprocate that respect in addressing your issue or assessing patches and features.
As much as possible, we try to avoid adding configuration and flags. The purpose of this tool is to provide the best experience for people getting started with React, and this will always be our first priority. This means that sometimes we sacrifice additional functionality (such as server rendering) because it is too hard to solve it in a way that wouldn’t require any configuration.
We prefer convention, heuristics, or interactivity over configuration.
Here’s a few examples of them in action.
Instead of letting the user specify the entry filename, we always assume it to be src/index.js
. Rather than letting the user specify the output bundle name, we generate it, but make sure to include the content hash in it. Whenever possible, we want to leverage convention to make good choices for the user, especially in cases where it’s easy to misconfigure something.
Normally, npm start
runs on port 3000
, and this is not explicitly configurable. However some environments like cloud IDEs want the programs to run on a specific port to serve their output. We want to play well with different environments, so Create React App reads PORT
environment variable and prefers it when it is specified. The trick is that we know cloud IDEs already specify it automatically so there is no need for the user to do anything. Create React App relies on heuristics to do the right thing depending on environment.
Another example of this is how npm test
normally launches the watcher, but if the CI
environment variable is set, it will run tests once. We know that popular CI environments set this variable so the user doesn’t need to do anything. It just works.
We prefer to add interactivity to the command line interface rather than add configuration flags. For example, npm start
will attempt to run with port 3000
by default but it may be busy. Many other tools just fail in this case and ask that you pass a different port, but Create React App will display a prompt asking if you’d like to run the app on the next available port.
Another example of interactivity is npm test
watcher interface. Instead of asking people to pass command line flags for switching between test runner modes or search patterns, we print a hint with keys that you can press during the test session to instruct watcher what to do. Jest supports both flags and interactive CLI but Create React App prefers long-running sessions to keep user immersed in the flow over short-running sessions with different flags.
No rules are perfect. Sometimes we may introduce flags or configuration if we believe the value is high enough to justify the mental cost. For example, we know that apps may be hosted paths different from the root, and we need to support this use case. However we still try to fall back to heuristics when possible. In this example, we ask that you specify homepage
in package.json
, and infer the correct path based on it. We also nudge the user to fill out the homepage
after the build so the user becomes aware that the feature exists.
Good pull requests, such as patches, improvements, and new features, are a fantastic help. They should remain focused in scope and avoid containing unrelated commits.
Please ask first if somebody else is already working on this or the core developers think your feature is in-scope for Create React App. Generally always have a related issue with discussions for whatever you are including.
Please also provide a test plan, i.e. specify how you verified that your addition works.
-
Clone the repo with
git clone https://github.com/facebookincubator/create-react-app
-
Run
npm install
in the rootcreate-react-app
folder and thecreate-react-app/global-cli
folder
Once it is done, you can modify any file locally and run npm start
, npm test
or npm run build
just like in a generated project.
If you want to try out the end-to-end flow with the global CLI, you can do this too:
npm run create-react-app my-app
cd my-app
and then run npm start
or npm run build
.
- Tag all merged PRs that go into the release with the relevant milestone.
- Close the milestone.
- In most releases, only
react-scripts
needs to be released. If you don’t have any changes to theglobal-cli
folder, you don’t need to bump its version or publish it. - Note that files in
global-cli
should be modified with extreme caution. Since it’s a global CLI, any version ofcreate-react-app
(global CLI) including very old ones should work with the latest version ofreact-scripts
. - Add an entry to
CHANGELOG.md
detailing what has changed with links to PRs and their authors. Use previous entries for inspiration. Group changes toreact-scripts
andcreate-react-app
separately in the notes, for example like in0.2.0
release notes. - Make sure to include “Migrating from ...” instructions for the previous release. Often you can copy and paste them.
- After merging the changelog update, create a GitHub Release with the same text. See previous Releases for inspiration.
- If you are releasing updates to the
create-react-app
CLI (likely not), go toglobal-cli
, bump the version inpackage.json
and runnpm publish
in that folder. - If you are releasing updates to
react-scripts
(most likely!), bump the version inpackage.json
. Do not runnpm publish
. Instead, runsh tasks/release.sh
. - Wait for a long time, and it will get published. Don’t worry that it’s stuck. It will bundle dependencies into a single tarball before publishing for faster installs.
Make sure to test the released version! If you want to be extra careful, you can publish a prerelease by running sh tasks/release.sh --tag next
instead of sh tasks/release.sh
.
Many thanks to h5bp for the inspiration with this contributing guide