How to Build Your Own React Package and NPM Install in Another Project

Michael Tong
The Startup
Published in
3 min readAug 26, 2020
Photo by Brandable Box on Unsplash

If you ever want to publish your own library, you will need to upload a new project onto Github.

In this tutorial, I will teach all of you how to create your own react project, upload it to GitHub, create another react project, and uploading the initially created project as a package.

To begin, you need to install node on your machine with the following command:

  • curl “https://nodejs.org/dist/latest/node-${VERSION:-$(wget -qO- https://nodejs.org/dist/latest/ | sed -nE ‘s|.*>node-(.*)\.pkg</a>.*|\1|p’)}.pkg” > “$HOME/Downloads/node-latest.pkg” && sudo installer -store -pkg “$HOME/Downloads/node-latest.pkg” -target “/”

Now create a folder and create index.js. Index.js is where you will be exporting your functions from the package.

Afterward, create a package.json within the same folder and include the following:

This will be a repository consists of util functions that we will export.

Afterward, create index.js and include the following:

Next, we need to log in to github.com. If you haven’t created any account please do so.

Afterward, go to https://github.com/new and create a public repository. You can name it anything and you want and don’t initialize the readme. Click “Create Repository”.

Now go to terminal and ls to the directory/folder that contains index.js(I name it as utilsExport.js but it is really index.js) and package.json. Your project structure should look something similar to this:

If you go to the webpage you were on after creating a repository in GitHub, locate “…or create a new repository on the command line” and run the instructions, line by line.

Go to your GitHub and locate your utils directory. Click on code and you should get a URL under “clone with https”. Keep that URL on hold as you will be including this URL in your new project package.json.

Photo by Octavian Dan on Unsplash

Now create a new react project.

Step 1: run curl "https://nodejs.org/dist/latest/node-${VERSION:-$(wget -q0- https://nodejs.org/dist/latest/ | sed -nE 's|.*>node-(.*)\.pkg</a>.*|\1|p')}.pkg”> "$HOME/Downloads/node-latest.pkg” && sudo installer -store -pkg "$HOME/Downloads/node-latest.pkg” -target "/”

Step 2: run the following command to create a new react project: npx create-react-app sample-project

Step 3: After the project is successfully, go to package.json and add the following line under “dependencies”: “utils”: “git+https://github.com/<username>/Utils.git”

Step 4: run npm install

Step 5: in app.js, you can import { add, sub } from “utils” and utilize within the application.

That’s how it is to creating your external dependencies and incorporating them into another application.

Now you can create your own open-source libraries if you want to!

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