Getting Started

Developers will often use Flow and React together, so it is important that Flow can effectively type both common and advanced React patterns. This guide will teach you how to use Flow to create safer React applications.

In this guide we will assume you know the React basics and focus on adding types for patterns you are already familiar with. We will be using examples based on react-dom, but all of these patterns work in other environments like react-native as well.

Setup Flow with React

Flow and Babel work well together, so it doesn’t take much to adopt Flow as a React user who already uses Babel. If you need to setup Babel with Flow, you can follow this guide.

Babel also works out of the box with Create React App, just install Flow and create a .flowconfig.

React Runtimes

Flow supports the @babel/plugin-transform-react-jsx runtime options required to use JSX without explicitly importing the React namespace.

If you are using the new automatic runtime, use this configuration in your .flowconfig so that Flow knows to auto-import jsx:

[options]
react.runtime=automatic