This is old news, and both the web, world and myself have advanced since this was written. Just use create-react-app instead
tldr; Here it is.
In my endeavours to get to grips with front-end JS development, I did some research and decided to launch into learning React by Facebook. This in turn introduced me to the huge complicated mess that is front-end tooling.
A lot of React tutorials and documentation requires that you use webpack, so that’s my module loader chosen for me. I didn’t fancy using webpack to manage my non-JS assets (although you can) so I decided to use Gulp to fill in the gaps.
An hour of looking at documentation later, I produced a relatively bare-bones boilerplate project. The readme goes over the details but essentially run the following command to install the dependancies.
npm install
That’s it.
Then just run gulp to build it all! I’ve also included a gulp task to start webpack-dev-server and allow it to hot-load changes to your JS/JSX. Just run gulp webpack-server and it will load up the server and compile your changes on the fly.
If you have any suggestions or improvements let me know, I’m new to this!