React Parcel Example

A minimum viable React app with Parcel Bundler

What's inside?

• parcel-bundler
• react
• react-dom
• babel-preset-react-app
• autoprefixer

Also checkout out the TypeScript branch

Getting started

Clone and install deps

git clone [email protected]:jaredpalmer/react-parcel-example.git
cd react-parcel-example
yarn
yarn start

Then open http://localhost:1234 and edit index.js and press save. Parcel will automagically hot reload you files whenever you make changes.

Building for Production

npm run build

This will compile your JS and copy your index.html to the dist folder which you can deploy wherever as a good ol' webpage.

Parcel uses PostCSS plugins to manage CSS assets. I've included autoprefixer for vendor prefixing with the same setup as create-react-app. You can find and modify the PostCSS setup in package.json. If you'd rather keep your PostCSS setup in a dotfile, you can delete the postcss key from package.json, and place its contents in a .postcssrc file too.

Folder structure and relative paths

Keeping everything in the root directory obviously won't scale past a point. Parcel is very flexible about folder structure, but there are a few gotchas.

Moving JS entry

When you do move index.js just make sure to update the <script> tag in index.html so that it points to the correct relative path.

For example, if you want to move index.js to src/index.js, you would need make the following change to index.html:

<   <script src="./index.js"></script>
---
>   <script src="./src/index.js"></script>

Moving index.html

If you want to move index.html, you will need to update your npm scripts in package.json with the new relative path.

Deployment

Refer to the deployment guide in create-react-app, just note that you will need to account for the fact that Parcel builds out to a dist directory, while CRA builds to a build directory. You can make it identical by adding --out-dir build to both start and build npm tasks in package.json.