Manually adding create-react-app scripts to an existing React app

create-react-app saves you a ton of time to get a new React app set up with all the dependencies you need for an ES6 based React app using Babel and webpack. Adding the scripts and config to an existing app though doesn’t seem to be documented in the user guide. This post here though walks through the basics.

All you need is to:

npm install react-scripts --save-dev

Then and the default scripts to your package.json:

"scripts": {
    "start": "react-scripts start",
    "build": "react-scripts build",
    "test": "react-scripts test --env=jsdom",
    "eject": "react-scripts eject"
}

Then assuming you have structured your project folders the same as an app created with create-react-app, you’ll be able to ‘npm run start’ and off you go.