Once upon a time, when NVIDIA was nothing but a graphics card, it was quite a bit of work assembling a good build chain for React. These days, the process is much simpler, and the once ubiquitous create-react-app option is no more. Vite is now the standard choice for launching a new app from the React terminal, so that’s the approach you’ll learn here.
With that said, there are a few alternatives worth mentioning. VS Code has extensions that will provide you with templates or scaffolding, but what’s becoming more common is using an AI coding assistant. A tool like Copilot, ChatGPT, or Gemini can take a prompt describing the basics of the application in question, including the instruction to use React, and produce a basic React layout for you. AI assistants are available in both command-line and VS Code extension flavors. Or, for an even more forward-looking option, you could use something like Firebase Studio.
But enough about alternatives—Vite is the standard for a reason. It is repeatable, capable, and fast. To launch a new Vite app, you just enter the following in your command line:
