Deploying a React App to GitHub Pages

Earlier today, I worked on putting together this Sticky Note App, in an effort to get more comfortable with React.js. The application uses React.js, React DOM, and React Draggable.

After completing my application, I was about to tackle deployment with Heroku, since I’ve become pretty familiar with deploying various applications that consist of different stacks on Heroku.

However, this application was a lot simpler, so it seemed like using Heroku would have been a little excessive, especially since there’s no backend component for this application.

So I decided to tackle deploying the application via GitHub pages – which is already one of my favorite ways to deploy simple applications since I host all my repos there as well.

The first step I did, was use the create-react-app command in my terminal, where I then moved the various components of my simple React application. Then I followed the following steps:

Step 1

Edit package.json by adding a homepage

"homepage": "https://[insert username].github.io/[insert project repo name]"

Step 2

Run npm install --save-dev gh-pages

Step 3

Edit package.json by adding a predeploy and deploy script:

"scripts": {
"predeploy": "npm run build",
"deploy": "gh-pages -d build"
}

Step 4

Run: npm run deploy

And there you have it, a simple enough solution for deploying those simple enough React applications.