Yesterday I started to collect some notes on setting up React, Typescript, Babel, Webpack, Karma…. Holy cow! How many tools do you need just to get hello-react running? Fortunately, a web search short circuited most of that when the Interweb powers showed me Facebook’s create-react-app script “bundled” with recent versions of npm.

pkg install git    # you have to save your work
pkg install nodejs
npx create-react-app lookout-unicorns
cd lookout-unicorns
npm start

A couple of command-line entries later, node was scanning a directory, transpiling Typescript, running tslint and unit tests, and serving up the results. It was so easy, you must be able to do this on a Chromebook….

There aren’t many steps here. First install Termux, nominally an Android terminal emulator, but green-circle gateway to Linux from Chrome OS. We’ll briefly use its package manager to bootstrap into the npm world.

Now point your browser to http://localhost:3000. Chrome, surprisingly doesn’t recognize the URL, but Firefox for Android running on Chrome OS does.If you want to use Chrome to view your fruits…. Chrome OS assigns the Android emulator a private IP address which you can get from ifconfig in Termux or Crouton. This won’t be the same IP address assigned to your Chromebook by the network, but oddly Chrome OS will expose port 3000 to the world on your Chromebook’s IP address to the rest of the network, just not to its own Chrome browser….