I came up with an idea to start a series of posts on React that offers small tips on things you can do, errors that you might get, and anything else that future me might find useful.

I started by creating a new react app. The intention being that I would have a reference repository on GitHub.

The first part of this concerns starting react on a different port.

Why?

There are a couple of reasons that you may choose to do this, but one is to get around the issue when running:

npm start

Something is already running on port 3000

How

Have a look in your project for a file called package.json. In there, you should see something like this:

{ 
"name": "react-demos",
"version": "0.1.0",
"private": true,
"dependencies": {
"react": "^16.8.6",
"react-dom": "^16.8.6",
"react-scripts": "3.0.1"
},
"scripts": {
"start": "react-scripts start",
"build": "react-scripts build",
"test": "react-scripts test",
"eject": "react-scripts eject"
},

In the start section, you can add the port:

{ 
"name": "react-demos",
"version": "0.1.0",
"private": true,
"dependencies": {
"react": "^16.8.6",
"react-dom": "^16.8.6",
"react-scripts": "3.0.1"
},
"scripts": {
"start": "set PORT=3005 && react-scripts start",
"build": "react-scripts build",
"test": "react-scripts test",
"eject": "react-scripts eject"
},

The default port is 3000, so if you don’t specify a port, it will always try to start on 3000.

What if I don’t want to change the port / Why won’t react die?

You could try the following command is bash:

taskkill -F -IM node.exe

It should kill all of your React processes.

References

https://github.com/facebook/create-react-app/issues/1083

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/45544145/how-stop-after-running-react-scripts-start