Deploy a React Application to the Internet Quickly (And for Free)

Photo by Kevin Bhagat on Unsplash

Motivation

Over the last couple of weekends, I decided to revamp a personal project website and create a portfolio website for myself. In both cases, I reached for React, as it’s easy to setup and simple to add modular components, to display content in interesting ways.

Once I was happy with the results, I started to think about hosting. I didn’t really want to renew the hosting for the project website, and I definitely didn’t want to buy hosting for my personal site. Luckily, Github Pages offers free hosting (subject to some generous usage quotas). There are just a couple of very quick and simple steps to get your React application hosted using this service.

Install gh-pages

Assuming you have a React application, with an associated Github repo (which must be public), then you need to install gh-pages from npm. You’re going to make use of the CLI functionality of that package to deploy your React app.

Navigate to your project directory and run:

$ npm install gh-pages --save-dev

If you don’t have a React application, and you’d like to cookie cut one to follow along with this guide, you can run:

$ npx create-react-app my-app