The Best Way to Set Up a React Project as of March 2025

Use Vite. Vite is a build tool that provides a fast frontend development environment.https://vite.dev/

create-react-app has become outdated. It was the official tool developed by the React team, but development has largely stopped since 2023.

Vite uses ES Modules (ESM) and Hot Module Replacement (HMR) to make rebuilds during development extremely fast. Also,
it works great with the default settings, so you don't need cumbersome configuration like webpack.config.js.

Steps

Install Node.js.

You can create a project with the following command. Replace my-react-app with whatever name you like.

npm create vite@latest my-react-app -- --template react

Install the dependencies.

cd my-react-app
npm install

Let's start the development server.

npm run dev

Once you open the localhost URL shown in the command line, you're done!