What To Do if create-react-app Doesn’t Work

An 8-step guide to making it work

Photo by Zach Lucero on Unsplash.

create-react-app is a convenient way for React developers to initialize a new React application without having to worry about boilerplate templates, configuration, etc. It can save time and effort so you can get right into developing your app!

Theoretically, using create-react-app is as easy as this:

npx create-react-app my-app
cd my-app
npm start

However, you might run into an issue preventing create-react-app from executing — even if you’ve used it on your machine before.

In my case, I got the following message:

You are running create-react-app 4.0.0, which is behind the latest release (4.0.1).
We no longer support global installation of Create React App.

I was able to resolve this issue (though it was not as easy as the docs implied it would be), so I’ll cover what worked and what didn’t.

When I first tried to resolve the issue, naturally, I went to the create-react-app docs. They had this to say:

“If you’ve previously installed create-react-app globally via npm install -g create-react-app, we recommend you uninstall the package using npm uninstall -g create-react-app or yarn global remove create-react-app to…