custom-templates.md

id	title
custom-templates	Custom Templates

Note: this feature is available with react-scripts@3.3.0 and higher.

Custom Templates enable you to select a template to create your project from, while still retaining all of the features of Create React App.

You'll notice that Custom Templates are always named in the format cra-template-[template-name], however you only need to provide the [template-name] to the creation command.

npm

npm init react-app my-app --template [template-name]

Yarn

yarn create react-app my-app --template [template-name]

Finding custom templates

We ship two templates by default:

• cra-template
• cra-template-typescript

However, you can find many great community templates by searching for "cra-template-*" on npm.

Building a template

If you're interested in building a custom template, first take a look at how we've built cra-template.

A template must have the following structure:

my-app/
  README.md (for npm)
  template.json
  package.json
  template/
    README.md (for projects created from this template)
    gitignore
    public/
      index.html
    src/
      index.js (or index.tsx)

The template folder

This folder is copied to the user's app directory as Create React App installs. During this process, the file gitignore is renamed to .gitignore.

You can add whatever files you want in here, but you must have at least the files specified above.

The template.json file

This is the configuration file for your template. It allows you to define information that should become a part of the generated project's package.json file, such as dependencies (only dependencies are supported for now) and any custom scripts that your template relies on. It should be structured as follows:

{
  "package": {
    "dependencies": {
      "serve": "^11.2.0"
    },
    "scripts": {
      "serve": "serve -s build",
      "build-and-serve": "npm run build && npm run serve"
    },
    "browserslist": [
      "defaults",
      "not IE 11",
      "not IE_Mob 11",
      "maintained node versions",
    ]
  }
}

Any values you add for "dependencies" and "scripts" will be merged with the values used in the initialisation process of react-scripts. Any other information you add to "package" will be added to the generated project's package.json file, replacing any existing values associated with those keys.

For convenience, we always replace npm run with yarn in your custom "scripts", as well as in your README when projects are initialized with yarn.