Deploy Create React App with Surge

Have you heard of Create React App? It’s a tool for bootstrapping React apps. Better than a boilerplate where you have to manage the dependencies yourself, Create React App (a.k.a. CRA) contains all the Webpack magic and build scripts. It’s one command to generate a project, and then all you need to do to create a production-ready JS bundle is run npm run build.

Now, how can you get that app live on the internet?

• Set up a VPS, configure nginx, and scp up the files. (“30 minutes”, but probably like 4 hours)
• Configure an Amazon S3 bucket and then set it up correctly to serve a single-page app? (10-30 minutes)
• Just use Surge (27 seconds)

Deploying an app to Surge is insanely easy, and it’s even free (including a custom domain and SSL).

Here’s a 27-second video.

Here are the steps:

(This assumes you already have an app created with Create React App.)

1. Install Surge:

   npm install -g surge

2. Run the Create React App build:

   cd your-react-project 
   npm run build

3. Switch into the build directory:

   cd build

4. Run Surge, and follow the prompts. All it needs is an email and a password, and you can optionally specify a different domain name.

   surge

5. Go to the URL it prints out. For instance, http://lively-payment.surge.sh/.

Happy deploying!

Deploy Create React App with Surge was originally published by Dave Ceddia at Dave Ceddia on January 30, 2017.

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