Installing Dependencies for React with Webpack Projects

Now that we have an empty Webpack Configuration file (webpack.config.js) and a freshly made Package file (package.json), we need to install some dependencies. Installing dependencies automatically adds some data to our package.json.

This project will depend on React, ReactDOM, Webpack, and Webpack Dev Server. It will also depend on a number of Babel packages, because we are going to be writing code using ES6, and Babel is an ES6 transpiler.

The dependencies we require in detail:

Package	Reason
React	'An npm package to get you immediate access to React, without also requiring the JSX transformer.'
React DOM	'This package serves as the entry point of the DOM-related rendering paths. It is intended to be paired with the isomorphic React, which will be shipped as react to npm.'
Webpack	'Allows to split your codebase into multiple bundles, which can be loaded on demand.'
Webpack Dev Server	'Serves a webpack app. Updates the browser on changes.'
Babel Loader	'Babel module loader for Webpack.'
Babel Core	Required for Babel Loader.
Babel Preset: ES2015	Required for Babel Loader.
Babel Preset: React	Required for Babel Loader.

We can go ahead and install all these modules with a single command:

npm install --save-dev react react-dom webpack webpack-dev-server babel-loader babel-core babel-preset-es2015 babel-preset-react

If we look at our package.json file now, we will notice that our devDependencies has become a list of the Node packages we just installed. This is important because it means we can install these again if we need to using npm install.

• Help: More about dependencies and devDependencies