create-react-app is a great way to bootstrap a React project, especially if you are building a single-page app. When building an SPA, you more likely than not will have a backend API that you interact with.
You can set up your React app to interact with that backend API server in
development using the proxy configuration in package.json.
// package.json
...
"proxy": "http://localhost:4000",
}This will allow you to keep your API calls nice and clean.
fetch("/api/session", ...No need to manage some sort of host URL environment variable.
Additionally, this will remove an CORS issues because the webpackDevServer
will be proxying any paths that it doesn't recognize to the host and port
that you've specified.
See the create-react-app
docs
for more details.