React with TypeScript

How to create an Electron app with React, TypeScript, and Electron Forge

Adding React support to the TypeScript + Webpack template is fairly straightforward and doesn't require a complicated boilerplate to get started.

The following guide has been tested with React 18, TypeScript 4.3, and Webpack 5.

Create the app and setup the TypeScript config

Create the app with the TypeScript + Webpack template, then edit the newly created tsconfig.json to add the key-value entry "jsx": "react-jsx" to the "compilerOptions" section.

Add the React dependencies

Add the basic React packages to your dependencies and the corresponding types to your devDependencies:

npm install --save react react-dom
npm install --save-dev @types/react @types/react-dom

Integrate React code

You should now be able to start writing and using React components in your Electron app. The following is a very minimal example of how to start to add React code:

src/app.tsx

import { createRoot } from 'react-dom/client';

const root = createRoot(document.body);
root.render(<h2>Hello from React!</h2>);

src/renderer.ts

// Add this to the end of the existing file
import './app';

For more about React, see their documentation.