Write your own Create React App template

Detailed Guide to creating your own Create React App template

Tl,dr: Since December ‘19 Create React App (also known as CRA) allows you to write custom templates. That can help you to quickly create projects with your preferred stack. Templates can be published as npm modules and are used to create a new React project.

Motivation

CRA (Create React App) is a tool from Facebook helping you building modern React applications, without having to worry about configuring the dev environment. Up until recently, they created a small ‘Hello World’ like application to help getting you started. You then had to install and integrate most of the libraries you wanted to use. Think of adding a CSS-in-JS styling library, your State Management solution and the like.

Nowadays they added the possibility to write and use your own custom template. This allows you, to bootstrap your CRA project with exactly the stack you prefer and go from there. CRA templates can be used with npx create-react-app your-app --template your-published-template.

How can we write our own template? Take a look at the two official templates in their repo for inspiration: CRA template and CRA template typescript.

The official documentation is still kind of barebones, but will give you a good overview.

Keep reading, if you want a more detailed writeup, of how to create your custom Create React App template.

_{^{Start building your next React project. Photo by 贝莉儿 DANIST on Unsplash.}}

What’s needed

A custom Create React App template is a module on npm which has to use a certain folder structure:

your-app/
  README.md
  template.json
  package.json
  template/
    README.md
    gitignore
    public/
      index.html
    src/
      index.js

The template.json file contains the dependencies as well as potential new scripts for the created projects. The /template folder basically becomes the created application, it will be copied during the initialisation phase of Create React App.

Custom templates also have to follow a certain naming convention, they have to use the format cra-template-[your-custom-template]. This comes in the package.json. Quite long? Luckily, we can omit the cra-template prefix and just use the your-custom-template name in the CRA command, like in npx create-react-app your-app --template your-custom-template.

Did you note the missing dot before the template/gitignore file? This is on purpose, the dot will be added by CRA. They also switch all occurrences of npm run with yarn in your scripts and Readme, if you are using yarn. Good to know, right?

Also note that you can add more files and dependencies to your template project as you wish. Keep in mind, that everything in /template will be part of the created project, everything else not.

Create your new template

Alright, time to see how to write our own template.

To start writing a custom Create React App template I find it easiest to bootstrap it with CRA itself. So let’s npx create-react-app cra-template-your-custom-template and CRA will do its’ thing (substitute your-custom-template with however you want to name your project). The default template will be used.

Now the fun part begins. You can remove stuff you never use (like the rotating logo) and add all your preferred libs, as you would in a plain React app. Want a router? A CSS-in-JS lib? A state management tool? Animation? Something? Let’s install whatever you want and import it in your application. My recommendation is to do that in the src folder. Doing that, you can test and run your app normally with npm run test and npm run start. The goal is to get your project to the point you would love to start your future React projects at.

As soon as you consider your project to be at a nice ‘starting point’, you have to make it a template. For that create the template.json file at your project root:

{
  "dependencies": {
    "styled-components": "^4.4.1"
  },
  "scripts": {
    "custom-start": "npm run start"
  }
}

Copy all dependencies you need from your package.json into the dependencies field, and all custom scripts into the scripts field. All the dependencies here will be installed on the bootstrapped projects. react, react-dom and react-scripts are CRAs’ default dependencies, you don’t have to include them. Right now, devDependencies are not supported. If you don’t have any new dependencies or scripts you can omit the corresponding block. BMake sure you add at least an empty template.json file (with content {}).

Then, create the /template folder and copy your /src and /public folder into it, as well as the .gitignore (and remove the dot from gitignore in the template folder). You should also consider adding a /template/README.md, this will become the initial README of the created projects.

Lastly, we have to make some changes to our package.json file. At the very least, make sure that name starts with cra-template-, remove the private field and add "main": "template.json",. Without these, Create React Apps’ template creation will fail. You may also consider adding more fields for a nice npm package, like author, repository, description etc.

Publishing to npm is a topic of its own. To keep the scope small: After registering at npm and authorising on the CLI, you could publish the project with npm publish --access public.

Wow, congratulations, you should now have created and published a Create React App custom template. Bootstrap a new React application with npx create-react-app your-app --template your-custom-template.

Enjoy.

Tips

Create React App can use a local template (on your filesystem). This is useful for development, or if you don’t want to publish. Use npx create-react-app your-app --template file:. in your template root folder.

You can also use npm scopes to namespace your template. Then you have to prepend your package name with your scope @your-scope/cra-template-your-custom-template. You can still omit cra-template from the Create React App command like in npx create-react-app your-app --template @your-scope/your-custom-template.

Hope this helps you to create your own CRA template. Feel free to let me know about your templates or if you get stuck along the way. Tweet at me or leave a comment.