Creating a React app

React is a standalone application. Because of this, we will usually have our React application in its own GitHub repository. If you want to keep your Rust application and React application in the same GitHub repository, that is fine, but just make sure that they are in different directories in the root. Once we have navigated outside of the Rust web application, we can run the following command:

npx create-react-app front_end

This creates a React application in the front_end directory. If we look inside, we will see that there are a lot of files. Remember that this book is about web programming in Rust. Exploring everything about React is beyond the scope of this book. However, a book dedicated to React development is suggested in the Further reading section. For now, we will focus on the front_end/package.json file. Our package.json file is like our Cargo.toml file, where we define dependencies, scripts, and other metadata around the application that we...