Creating a single-page application

In this section, we will create a new single-page React application from scratch, starting with setting up a new project with Webpack and Babel. Setting up a React project from scratch will help you understand the basic needs of a project, which is crucial for any project you create.

Setting up a project

Every time you create a new React project, the first step is to create a new directory on your local machine. Since this is the first chapter for which you're going to build a single-page application, name this directory chapter-1.

Inside this new directory, execute the following from the command line:

npm init -y

Running this command will create a fresh package.json file with the bare minimum of information needed to run a JavaScript/React project. By adding the -y flag to the command, we can automatically skip the steps where we set information such as the name, version, and description.

After running this command, the following...