How I Automate All the Boring Parts of My Job with Create React App DevOps

As a seasoned full-stack developer who has worked on countless React projects, I‘ve had my fill of the tedious, repetitive tasks that are an unavoidable part of the job. You know the ones I‘m talking about—setting up build tool configurations, writing boilerplate code, managing complex dependency graphs, and so on. It‘s not that these things are difficult, per se. But they‘re not exactly exciting either. And when you‘re forced to do them over and over again, they can really start to wear on your coding joy.

But here‘s the thing: in this era of DevOps automation, there‘s no reason for any of us to be wasting our time on such soul-crushing drudgery. We have access to a plethora of powerful tools and frameworks that can take care of the boring bits for us, freeing us to focus on the challenging, creative, downright fun work of building great software. Foremost among these is Create React App (CRA), a command line tool from Facebook that instantly generates a complete React project skeleton preconfigured with all the modern best practices.

The High Cost of Doing It the Hard Way

Before we dive into CRA and friends, let‘s take a moment to quantify just how much of a productivity killer all of those manual DevOps chores can be. A recent study by Stripe found that the average developer spends over 17 hours per week on maintenance tasks like debugging, refactoring, and writing documentation. That‘s more than 40% of their overall coding time!

Another survey from Atlassian reported that 60% of developers cite wasted time as their biggest complaint with their jobs. The top three culprits? Waiting for tests to run, waiting for builds to complete, and waiting for code reviews.

All of this waiting and manual labor adds up to a staggering amount of lost productivity. Let‘s do the math. Say you have a team of 10 developers, each earning an average salary of $100,000 per year. If they‘re spending 40% of their time on maintenance busywork, that‘s the equivalent of 4 full-time salaries going down the drain. Put another way, you‘re flushing $400,000 per year in opportunity cost!

But the damage goes beyond just wasted time and money. All of that tedious toil takes a real toll on developers‘ morale and enthusiasm for their craft. It‘s hard to feel passionate about your work when so much of it is, well, not particularly engaging or challenging. As the old saying goes, "the only thing worse than being bored is being bored and broke." And that‘s exactly the situation many React developers find themselves in.

The Power of Automation

So what‘s the solution? In a word: automation. By leveraging tools and frameworks that automate the repetitive parts of our workflows, we can dramatically reduce the amount of time and energy we spend on DevOps drudgery. This frees us to focus on the work that truly matters—crafting elegant, high-performance React components and delightful user experiences.

One of the most powerful automation tools in the React ecosystem is Create React App. If you‘re not familiar, CRA is a command line utility that allows you to generate a complete React project skeleton with a single command:

npx create-react-app my-app

That one line of code creates a new directory called my-app, scaffolds out a basic project structure, and installs all of the necessary dependencies and configuration files. You don‘t have to worry about setting up Webpack, Babel, ESLint, or any of the other finicky tools that are necessary for a modern React development workflow. CRA takes care of all of that for you.

But CRA‘s automation magic doesn‘t stop there. Out of the box, you get a bunch of other powerful features that would be a pain to set up manually:

• A built-in development server with hot reloading
• A fast interactive unit test runner with coverage reporting
• A build script to bundle JS, CSS, and images for production, with hashes and sourcemaps
• An offline-first service worker and a web app manifest for PWAs
• Hassle-free updates for the above tools with a single dependency

All of these niceties work seamlessly together to provide a highly productive, zero-configuration React development environment. You can start a new project with just a few keystrokes, and immediately begin writing application code without having to futz around with a bunch of convoluted configuration files.

But wait, there‘s more! CRA‘s baseline setup can be easily extended with all sorts of additional automation goodies…

Testing on Auto-Pilot

One of the most important (and often neglected) aspects of a healthy development workflow is a robust testing strategy. Unfortunately, setting up and maintaining a testing infrastructure can be a real challenge, especially for those of us who are not natural-born QA engineers.

Once again, Create React App comes to the rescue with a pre-configured testing environment powered by Jest, a delightful JavaScript testing framework from Facebook. Jest bills itself as a "zero configuration" test runner, and it certainly lives up to that promise. With CRA, you can start writing tests right away without any additional setup.

To add a new test, simply create a file with a .test.js suffix anywhere in your project‘s src directory. Jest will automatically detect the file and run it as part of your test suite. No configuration necessary!

import React from ‘react‘;
import ReactDOM from ‘react-dom‘;
import App from ‘./App‘;

it(‘renders without crashing‘, () => {
  const div = document.createElement(‘div‘);
  ReactDOM.render(<App />, div);
});

Running tests is just as easy. CRA provides a handy npm test script that will fire up Jest in watch mode and run your entire test suite. Every time you save a file, Jest will automatically re-run the tests associated with that file. If any tests fail, you‘ll get a helpful error message pointing you to the line of code where the failure occurred.

This kind of tight feedback loop is incredibly powerful. It allows you to catch bugs early and often, before they have a chance to make it into production. And because Jest runs your tests in parallel, in a separate process from your application code, you can be confident that your tests are providing an accurate reflection of your app‘s real-world behavior.

But wait, there‘s still more! In addition to Jest, CRA also comes with out-of-the-box support for code coverage reporting. Just run npm test -- --coverage, and Jest will generate a detailed report showing you exactly which lines of your code are being exercised by your tests. This is a great way to identify gaps in your test coverage and ensure that your app is being thoroughly validated.

Code coverage isn‘t a silver bullet, of course. It‘s possible to write tests that exercise 100% of your code but don‘t actually validate any meaningful behavior. But used judiciously, coverage reports can be a useful tool for keeping your tests honest.

Keeping Your Code Clean

Another tedious but important aspect of a robust development workflow is code linting and formatting. Consistent code style helps improve readability and maintainability, and can even prevent certain classes of bugs. But it can be a real pain to enforce, especially across a large team of developers.

Once again, Create React App has you covered. Out of the box, CRA includes a comprehensive ESLint configuration that checks your code for common errors and potential problems. If ESLint finds an issue, it will output a helpful error message pointing you to the offending line of code.

But CRA goes even further than that. It also comes with built-in support for automatically formatting your code using Prettier, an opinionated code formatter that enforces a consistent style across your entire codebase. With Prettier, you never have to waste time arguing about tabs vs. spaces, or whether to use single vs. double quotes. Prettier will take care of all of that for you, so you can focus on writing code instead of debating stylistic minutiae.

To run Prettier, simply invoke the npm run format script that comes pre-configured with every CRA project. Prettier will scan your src directory and automatically reformat any files that don‘t conform to its rules. You can even configure your editor to run Prettier automatically on save, so you never have to think about code formatting again!

Staying Up to Date

One of the most challenging aspects of modern web development is keeping your dependencies up to date. The JavaScript ecosystem moves at a breakneck pace, and it can be difficult to stay on top of all the latest versions of your various libraries and tools. But failing to keep your dependencies current can leave you open to security vulnerabilities, performance issues, and other problems.

Create React App helps ease this burden by providing a single dependency that you can update with a single command. Whenever a new version of CRA is released, you can update your project with a simple npm install react-scripts@latest. This will download the latest versions of all the various tools and libraries that CRA depends on, and update your project‘s configuration files accordingly.

Of course, even with CRA‘s simplified updating process, it can still be a challenge to keep your dependencies current. That‘s where tools like Dependabot come in. Dependabot is a free service that automatically creates pull requests to update your dependencies whenever new versions are released. It‘s like having a full-time security guard for your package.json file!

Setting up Dependabot is easy. Just add a .dependabot/config.yml file to your project with the following contents:

version: 1
update_configs:
  - package_manager: "javascript"
    directory: "/"
    update_schedule: "weekly"

With this configuration, Dependabot will check for updates to your JavaScript dependencies every week, and automatically create a pull request with the new versions. All you have to do is review the PR and merge it into your codebase.

Putting It All Together

At this point, it should be clear that Create React App provides an incredibly powerful foundation for automating your React development workflow. By taking care of all the tedious configuration and setup work, CRA frees you to focus on the fun, creative, and challenging parts of building great React applications.

But CRA is just the beginning. As we‘ve seen, there are all sorts of other tools and services that you can layer on top of CRA to automate even more of your workflow. From testing and code formatting to dependency management and continuous integration, there‘s no shortage of ways to streamline your development process.

Of course, automating your workflow is not without its challenges. It can be tempting to go overboard and try to automate everything, but that‘s rarely a good idea. As with any tool, it‘s important to use automation judiciously, and only where it makes sense.

It‘s also important to remember that automation is not a substitute for good development practices. A well-automated workflow can help you catch bugs and enforce consistency, but it can‘t make up for sloppy coding or poor design decisions. Automation is a tool, not a magic wand.

But used wisely, automation can be an incredibly powerful tool for streamlining your development process and increasing your productivity. By taking care of the boring, repetitive parts of your job, automation frees you to focus on the work that truly matters—building great React applications that delight your users.

So if you‘re not already using Create React App and its ecosystem of automation tools, I highly recommend giving them a try. With a little upfront investment, you can dramatically reduce the amount of time and energy you spend on tedious DevOps tasks, and get back to the fun, creative work of building software.

And who knows? You might even find yourself enjoying your job again!

Conclusion

In this article, we‘ve seen how Create React App and its ecosystem of automation tools can help streamline your React development workflow and increase your productivity. By taking care of the boring, repetitive parts of your job, CRA frees you to focus on the challenging, creative work of building great React applications.

We‘ve also seen how CRA‘s automation magic can be extended with additional tools and services like Jest, Prettier, and Dependabot. By layering these tools on top of CRA, you can automate even more of your workflow, from testing and code formatting to dependency management and continuous integration.

But automation is not a panacea. It‘s important to use it judiciously, and only where it makes sense. Automation is no substitute for good development practices, and it can‘t make up for sloppy coding or poor design decisions.

That said, when used wisely, automation can be an incredibly powerful tool for streamlining your development process and increasing your productivity. If you‘re not already using Create React App and its ecosystem of automation tools, I highly recommend giving them a try. With a little upfront investment, you can dramatically reduce the amount of time and energy you spend on tedious DevOps tasks, and get back to the fun, creative work of building software.

So what are you waiting for? Go forth and automate! Your future self will thank you.