Create-React-App Integration

Create-React-App allows to bootstrap single-page React applications. It provides a pre-configured build setup with no configuration.

Warning: We don’t recommend using Create-React-App for new applications, as it is not maintained anymore. Prefer create-react-admin (based on Vite), Remix, or Next.js instead.

Setting Up Create React App

Create a new Create React App (CRA) project with the command line:

yarn create react-app my-admin

We recommend using the TypeScript template:

yarn create react-app my-admin --template typescript

Setting Up React-Admin

Add the react-admin package, as well as a data provider package. In this example, we’ll use ra-data-json-server to connect to a test API provided by JSONPlaceholder.

cd my-admin
yarn add react-admin ra-data-json-server

Next, create the admin app component in src/admin/index.tsx:

// in src/admin/index.tsx
import { Admin, Resource, ListGuesser } from "react-admin";
import jsonServerProvider from "ra-data-json-server";

const dataProvider = jsonServerProvider("https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com");

const App = () => (
  <Admin dataProvider={dataProvider}>
    <Resource name="posts" list={ListGuesser} />
    <Resource name="comments" list={ListGuesser} />
  </Admin>
);

export default App;

This is a minimal admin for 2 resources. React-admin should be able to render a list of posts and a list of comments, guessing the data structure from the API response.

Next, replace the App.tsx component with the following:

import MyAdmin from "./admin";

const App = () => <MyAdmin />;

export default App;

Now, start the server with yarn start, browse to http://localhost:3000/, and you should see the working admin:

Your app is now up and running, you can start tweaking it.

Ensuring Users Have The Latest Version

If your users might keep the application open for a long time, it’s a good idea to add the <CheckForApplicationUpdate> component. It will check whether a more recent version of your application is available and prompt users to reload their browser tab.

To determine whether your application has been updated, it fetches the current page at a regular interval, builds a hash of the response content (usually the HTML) and compares it with the previous hash.

To enable it, start by creating a custom layout:

// in src/admin/MyLayout.tsx
import type { ReactNode } from 'react';
import { CheckForApplicationUpdate, Layout } from 'react-admin';

export const MyLayout = ({ children }: { children: ReactNode}) => (
    <Layout>
        {children}
        <CheckForApplicationUpdate />
    </Layout>
);

Then use this layout in your app:

import { Admin, Resource, ListGuesser } from "react-admin";
import jsonServerProvider from "ra-data-json-server";
+import { MyLayout } from './MyLayout';

const dataProvider = jsonServerProvider("https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com");

const App = () => (
-  <Admin dataProvider={dataProvider}>
+  <Admin dataProvider={dataProvider} layout={MyLayout}>
    <Resource name="posts" list={ListGuesser} />
    <Resource name="comments" list={ListGuesser} />
  </Admin>
);

export default App;