Installing ReactJS with NPM

Check whether node is already installed on your machine using node -v.

Otherwise, install the node packages from their website (https://nodejs.org/en/), based on your operating system.

We cover installing packages through NPM in Chapter 8, Testing React Components and Chapter 9, Deployment.

If you have Node and NPM configured on your machine, execute the following command inside your application's folder from any console tool to install react-tools:

npm install react-tools

Once installed, you can reference React dependency as follows:

Var React = require('react');

From now on, you can use the React variable and its methods, such as React.createClass({…});. Remember that because you've installed it using NPM, it's required that you bundle your code or transform it to a static asset before testing your application. In Chapter 2, Exploring JSX, we're going to cover some transform tools that you might use. You can check for more details about deployment in Chapter 8, Preparing Your Code for Deployment.

Installing ReactJS with Bower

Unlike NPM, Bower controls browser-ready packages, so it's also the same. Apart from using the NPM packages, we can also use Bower-ready packages (https://facebook.github.io/react/downloads.html). Bower helps to maintain all the packages by installing and maintaining the correct versions of the necessary packages (http://bower.io/).

First, make sure that you have Bower installed and configured. After this, execute the following command:

bower install --save react

This will save ReactJS as a dependency in you Bower configuration file. Now you just need to reference that in your HTML code. By default, it's provided at ./bower_components/react/react.js. The minified version is also provided in the same folder at react.min.js.