This is an how I like to setup my react project. I generally like to use vite its faster and than create-react-app and has a much cleaner setup.

If you are a bit lazy like me, download my script and execute it.

Execute the following code :

wget -O react.sh https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Arghyahub/SCRIPTS/main/react/react.sh
chmod +x react.sh
./react.sh

Continue with setup

Execute the following commands

To create vite app and current folder

npm create vite@latest .

Once you setup your react project you'll find some files, that you might not need. I generally clean them up

|-public
|   |-vite.svg // not req
|
|-src
|   |-assets // not req

Run this code to remove them

rm public/vite.svg
rm -r src/assets

The css files such as Index.css and App.css will have some default styles. We don't require that

echo > src/App.css
echo > src/index.css

Finally clean App.tsx or App.jsx files with some tsrafce or rafce

Paste this into your App.jsx or App.tsx

import "./App.css";
 
const App = () => {
  return <div>App</div>;
};
 
export default App;

Don't forget the edit the favicon in html file

And we are done with a clean setup ✨.

Typescript settings

The setup is done but if you are using Typescript, you might need to look at you eslintrc and tsconfig settings.

Here's what I use

eslintrc.cjs

module.exports = {
  root: true,
  env: { browser: true, es2020: true },
  extends: [
    "eslint:recommended",
    "plugin:@typescript-eslint/recommended",
    "plugin:react-hooks/recommended",
  ],
  ignorePatterns: ["dist", ".eslintrc.cjs"],
  parser: "@typescript-eslint/parser",
  plugins: ["react-refresh"],
  rules: {
    "react-refresh/only-export-components": [
      "warn",
      { allowConstantExport: true },
    ],
    "no-unused-vars": "off",
    "@typescript-eslint/no-unused-vars": "warn",
    "@typescript-eslint/ban-types": "warn",
  },
};

I do not like getting no-unused-vars error, as a warning they are okay to me

tsconfig.app.json

{
  "compilerOptions": {
    "target": "ES2020",
    "useDefineForClassFields": true,
    "lib": ["ES2020", "DOM", "DOM.Iterable"],
    "module": "ESNext",
    "skipLibCheck": true,
 
    /* Bundler mode */
    "moduleResolution": "bundler",
    "allowImportingTsExtensions": true,
    "resolveJsonModule": true,
    "isolatedModules": true,
    "noEmit": true,
    "jsx": "react-jsx",
 
    /* Linting */
    "strict": false,
    "noUnusedLocals": false,
    "noUnusedParameters": false,
    "noFallthroughCasesInSwitch": false
  },
  "rules": {
    "no-unused-vars": false
  },
  "include": ["src", "/src/**.ts", "/src/**.tsx"],
  "exclude": ["node_modules"]
}

Important packages

A simple react project alone is not the useful, we typically use external packages to make things easy, get great features and improve developer experience.

Tailwind CSS

Tailwind CSS has revolutionized the web development experience. It was a headache to assign different class names and ids to html elements and then style them in their respective css files. We developers are aren't very efficient in coming up with names and searching them in a css file and then thinking why the overflow is occurring blows our mind.

Other than the naming issue faced by most developers, another problem with css was maintaining standardization across the website. Writing pixels of media queries, removing default css and what not. Tailwind has made things very easy and introduced shorthands for writing css as class names.

Setup tailwind as follows

npm install -D tailwindcss@latest postcss@latest autoprefixer@latest
npx tailwindcss init -p

Update the tailwind config

tailwind.config.js

/** @type {import('tailwindcss').Config} */
module.exports = {
  content: ["./src/**/*.{js,jsx,ts,tsx}"],
  theme: {
    extend: {},
  },
  plugins: [],
};

Then put the tailwind directives into you css file

index.css or app.css

@tailwind base;
@tailwind components;
@tailwind utilities;

And your tailwind setup is complete, try it out by writing

App.jsx

import "./App.css";
 
const App = () => {
  return <div className="bg-red-400">App</div>;
};
 
export default App;

Run the app and if your tailwind is correctly configured the App background will be red else follow the above steps again and don't forget to import the css file import "./index.css" .

React Router

React Router is by far the most import react package, it helps us creates different routes and manage them seamlessly, it also provides us with hooks to navigate between routes, get current route and many more.

Install react router like this:

npm install react-router-dom

Use it like this

App.jsx

import { createBrowserRouter, Link, RouterProvider } from "react-router-dom";
import "./App.css";
 
const router = createBrowserRouter([
  {
    path: "/",
    element: (
      <div>
        <p>Home</p>
        <Link to="/test">Go to Test</Link>
      </div>
    ),
  },
  {
    path: "/test",
    element: <div>Test</div>,
  },
]);
 
const App = () => {
  return <RouterProvider router={router} />;
};
 
export default App;

Zustand

Zustand has become my go-to state management library, it is very simple to use and very light. Previously I used Recoil but Facebook stopped maintaining it and seriously no one likes to write context api or redux.

Install zustand like this

npm install zustand

Shadcn UI

Shadcn UI has become my go to UI library, it is very simple to use and you get the access to the component code, so you can customize it how ever you want. You have the full creativity and control over it.

Install shadcn with vite is a little complicated, shadcn is primarily works well with Nextjs but I have found solutions to make it work with vite.

Pre-requisites

You must have tailwind installed

Then add these lines into your tsconfig.json

tsconfig.json

{
  "compilerOptions": {
    "baseUrl": ".",
    "paths": {
      "@/*": ["./src/*"]
    }
  },
  "files": [],
  "references": [
    {
      "path": "./tsconfig.app.json"
    },
    {
      "path": "./tsconfig.node.json"
    }
  ]
}

Also add the options into your tsconfig.app.json

tsconfig.app.json

{
  "compilerOptions": {
    /* Resolve path */
    "baseUrl": ".",
    "paths": {
      "@/*": ["./src/*"]
    },
 
    "composite": true,
    "tsBuildInfoFile": "./node_modules/.tmp/tsconfig.app.tsbuildinfo",
    "target": "ES2020",
    "useDefineForClassFields": true,
    "lib": ["ES2020", "DOM", "DOM.Iterable"],
    "module": "ESNext",
    "skipLibCheck": true,
 
    /* Bundler mode */
    "moduleResolution": "bundler",
    "allowImportingTsExtensions": true,
    "resolveJsonModule": true,
    "isolatedModules": true,
    "moduleDetection": "force",
    "noEmit": true,
    "jsx": "react-jsx",
 
    /* Linting */
    "strict": true,
    "noUnusedLocals": true,
    "noUnusedParameters": true,
    "noFallthroughCasesInSwitch": true
  },
  "include": ["src"]
}

Install types/node

npm i -D @types/node

Edit the vite.config file

vite.config.ts

import { defineConfig } from "vite";
import react from "@vitejs/plugin-react";
import path from "path";
 
// https://vitejs.dev/config/
export default defineConfig({
  plugins: [react()],
  resolve: {
    alias: {
      "@": path.resolve(__dirname, "./src"),
    },
  },
});

Now install shadcn

npx shadcn-ui@latest init

These are the options that I select

line-4 is Important

√ Would you like to use TypeScript (recommended)? ... no / yes
√ Which style would you like to use? » Default
√ Which color would you like to use as base color? » Slate
√ Where is your global CSS file? ... src/index.css
√ Would you like to use CSS variables for colors? ... no / yes
√ Are you using a custom tailwind prefix eg. tw-? (Leave blank if not) ...
√ Where is your tailwind.config.js located? ... tailwind.config.js
√ Configure the import alias for components: ... @/components
√ Configure the import alias for utils: ... @/lib/utils
√ Are you using React Server Components? ... no / yes
√ Write configuration to components.json. Proceed? ... yes

Your setup is complete now you can install any shadcn component using the cli and directly copy paste code.

The setup is complete, this is how I setup my react projects and I hope you find it useful ✨.

react