ant-design/docs/react/use-with-create-react-app.en-US.md

order	title
4	Use in create-react-app

create-react-app is one of the best React application development tools. We are going to use antd within it and modify the webpack config for some customized needs.

---

Install and Initialization

Before all start, you may need install yarn.

$ yarn create react-app antd-demo

# or

$ npx create-react-app antd-demo

The tool will create and initialize environment and dependencies automatically, please try config your proxy setting or use another npm registry if any network errors happen during it.

Then we go inside antd-demo and start it.

$ cd antd-demo
$ yarn start

Open the browser at http://localhost:3000/. It renders a header saying "Welcome to React" on the page.

Import antd

Below is the default directory structure.

├── README.md
├── package.json
├── public
│   ├── favicon.ico
│   └── index.html
├── src
│   ├── App.css
│   ├── App.js
│   ├── App.test.js
│   ├── index.css
│   ├── index.js
│   └── logo.svg
└── yarn.lock

Now we install antd from yarn or npm.

$ yarn add antd

Modify src/App.js, import Button component from antd.

import React from 'react';
import { Button } from 'antd';
import './App.css';

const App = () => (
  <div className="App">
    <Button type="primary">Button</Button>
  </div>
);

export default App;

Add antd/dist/antd.css at the top of src/App.css.

@import '~antd/dist/antd.css';

.App {
  text-align: center;
}

...

Ok, you should now see a blue primary button displayed on the page. Next you can choose any components of antd to develop your application. Visit other workflows of create-react-app at its User Guide.

We are successfully running antd components now, go build your own application!

Advanced Guides

In the real world, there are still lots of problems about antd-demo. For instance, we actually import styles of all components in the project which may be a css bundle size issue (It is OK then if you don't care the gzipped 60kb css file size).

Now we need to customize the default webpack config. We can achieve that by using react-app-rewired which is one of create-react-app's custom config solutions.

Import react-app-rewired and modify the scripts field in package.json. Due to new react-app-rewired@2.x issue, you shall need customize-cra along with react-app-rewired.

$ yarn add react-app-rewired customize-cra

/* package.json */
"scripts": {
-   "start": "react-scripts start",
-   "build": "react-scripts build",
-   "test": "react-scripts test",
+   "start": "react-app-rewired start",
+   "build": "react-app-rewired build",
+   "test": "react-app-rewired test",
}

Then create a config-overrides.js at root directory of your project for further overriding.

module.exports = function override(config, env) {
  // do stuff with the webpack config...
  return config;
};

Use babel-plugin-import

Note: antd support ES6 tree shaking by default even without this babel plugin for js part.

babel-plugin-import is a babel plugin for importing components on demand (How does it work?). We are now trying to install it and modify config-overrides.js.

$ yarn add babel-plugin-import

+ const { override, fixBabelImports } = require('customize-cra');

- module.exports = function override(config, env) {
-   // do stuff with the webpack config...
-   return config;
- };
+ module.exports = override(
+   fixBabelImports('antd', {
+     libraryDirectory: 'es',
+     style: 'css',
+   }),
+ );

Remove the @import '~antd/dist/antd.css'; statement added before because babel-plugin-import will import styles and import components like below:

  // src/App.js
  import React, { Component } from 'react';
- import Button from 'antd/es/button';
+ import { Button } from 'antd';
  import './App.css';

  class App extends Component {
    render() {
      return (
        <div className="App">
          <Button type="primary">Button</Button>
        </div>
      );
    }
  }

  export default App;

Then reboot with yarn start and visit the demo page, you should not find any warning messages in the console, which prove that the import on demand config is working now. You will find more info about it in this guide.

Customize Theme

According to the Customize Theme documentation, to customize the theme, we need to modify less variables with tools such as less-loader. We can also use addLessLoader to achieve this. Import it and modify config-overrides.js like below.

$ yarn add less less-loader

- const { override, fixBabelImports } = require('customize-cra');
+ const { override, fixBabelImports, addLessLoader } = require('customize-cra');

module.exports = override(
  fixBabelImports('antd', {
    libraryDirectory: 'es',
-   style: 'css',
+   style: true,
  }),
+ addLessLoader({
+   lessOptions: { // If you are using less-loader@5 please spread the lessOptions to options directly
+     javascriptEnabled: true,
+     modifyVars: { '@primary-color': '#1DA57A' },
+   },
+ }),
);

We use modifyVars option of less-loader here. If you see a green button rendered on the page after rebooting the server, then the configuration was successful.

We have built-in dark theme and compact theme in antd, you can reference to Use dark or compact theme.

You could also try craco and craco-antd to customize create-react-app webpack config same as customize-cra does.

Note: It is recommended to use the latest version of less, or a minimum version greater than 3.0.1.

Replace momentjs to Day.js

You can use antd-dayjs-webpack-plugin plugin to replace momentjs to Day.js to reduce bundle size dramatically.

$ yarn add antd-dayjs-webpack-plugin

const { override, addWebpackPlugin } = require('customize-cra');
const AntdDayjsWebpackPlugin = require('antd-dayjs-webpack-plugin');

module.exports = override(addWebpackPlugin(new AntdDayjsWebpackPlugin()));

eject

You can also eject your application using yarn run eject for a custom setup of create-react-app, although you should dig into it by yourself.

Source code and other boilerplates

Finally, we used antd with create-react-app successfully, you can learn these practices for your own webpack workflow too, and find more webpack configs in the atool-build. (For instance, add moment noParse to avoid loading all language files.)

There are a lot of great boilerplates like create-react-app in the React community. There are some source code samples of importing antd in them if you encounter some problems.

• create-react-app-antd
• comerc/cra-ts-antd
• react-boilerplate/react-boilerplate
• kriasoft/react-starter-kit
• next.js
• nwb
• antd-react-scripts