ubuntu-create-react-app-and-london-class-6.md

Getting create-react-app working on Ubuntu (19.04)

problems and solutions

Main success conditions to be met:

We will be done if...

• npx create-react-app is runs and completes successfully
• student can run the react app created by the above
• student can use apt to install more software

discovered issues

• The apt installed version of node the student has does not include npm.
• the node version is anyway quite old
• The students' laptop is ubuntu 19.04 - a version which reached end-of-life in jan 2020 so is not supported by default configs.
  • sudo apt-get update doesn't work, etc

possible solutions

for the "old ubuntu" problem

• rejected: Override the safety with --allow-unauthorised or --allow-insecure-repositories
• Update to 19.10
• Update to the new LTS: 20.04?
  • Likely choosing this one eventually
  • Risk: newer version may be too slow on student's machine. (consider install dual boot?)
• update sources.list to find these repos at old-repositories.ubuntu.com
  • done, for now

What we did

For one student I guided them through a completely fresh install of ubuntu.

For the others:

• we sed-replaced the sources lists with old-repository.ubuntu.com references

  • https://askubuntu.com/a/91821/12816
  • Careful!
  • sudo sed -i -re 's/([a-z]{2}\.)?archive.ubuntu.com|security.ubuntu.com/old-releases.ubuntu.com/g' /etc/apt/sources.list

• sudo apt-get update

• install curl with apt-get

• we uninstalled nodejs using sudo apt-get remove nodejs

• we used curl with these instructions to download and (unsafe) exexcute a script which

  • https://github.com/nodesource/distributions/blob/master/README.md
  • CAUTION!
  • curl -sL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_14.x | sudo -E bash -
  • This configures the machine to have a 3rd-party ppa repository for binary node installs. (specifically we added one for v14)

• we installed nodejs using sudo apt-get install nodejs

  • this drew from the newly-added ppa

• we then ran npx create-react-app foo

  • which completed successfully

• we ran npm start in the relevant directory

  • but it complained about trying to spawn CHROME and errored out

• we set the environment variable in the user's ~/.bashrc file export BROWSER=google-chrome

• we ran npm start again success (but see later failure)

• stopping and starting again, we ran out of inotify watchers

Default was 8000. Boosted to 100000 (not 500000) following this vscode linux setup guide: https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/setup/linux

• success (tested multiple start/stops and edits)