Simplifying Imports in React with Base URL Configuration

12 May, 2024

Managing imports in a React project can get tricky, especially as your application scales and directories get deeper. Struggling with this myself, I asked chatGPT for some advise and discovered base URLs.

Using a base URL allows you to use absolute paths instead of relative ones, making your code cleaner and easier to maintain.

Why Use a Base URL?

Using complex relative paths like ../../../../components/MyComponent is error-prone and hard to maintain. With a base URL, you can import components using straightforward paths:

import MyComponent from 'components/MyComponent';

How to Set Up a Base URL

You can configure a base URL in your React project by editing the jsconfig.json. (Sidenote: when using 'create-react-app' the file is not automatically created so you will need to create one at the base of your project.)

Here's a simple config for jsconfig.json.

{
  "compilerOptions": {
    "baseUrl": "src"
  },
  "include": ["src/**/*"]
}

This configuration tells your compiler that any imports should be resolved starting from the src directory, simplifying your import statements across the project.

Hope this helps, have a great day!