10 Awesome React Packages That Every React Developer Should Know

Sean Marcus
4 min readJan 4, 2021

Intro

The following 10 packages are extremely popular for React developers, and for good reason. They make everything from design to transforming an object extremely simple for even the most Junior developers. If you are new to React and don’t have much knowledge on useful packages, this is a great place to start. Learn the following packages and what they do and you will be able to build virtually anything you can think of using React on the web. Let’s get started!

1. Material-UI

Material UI is a component library built with Google’s Material Design pattern in mind. It has virtually every UI component you would need and makes it quick, simple and clean to implement professional looking design into any web app. From autocomplete to navigation menus, Material-UI comes with everything you need to layout and build a great website or application for any project.

https://material-ui.com/

2. React-Three-Fiber

For anyone looking to use 3D in the web, react-three-fiber is a god send. It is a React renderer for three.js on the web that works for React and React-Native. It makes building dynamic scenes with reusable components extremely simple and brings order to your code. The 3D components react to changes in state and works out of the box on top of React’s ecosystem. There are no limitations to what this package can do, anything possible in three.js is possible and more!

https://www.npmjs.com/package/react-three-fiber

3. Axios

Axios is a promise baed HTTP client that makes working with APIs extremely simple for any developer. Due to it being promise based by default, working with asynchronous calls across the web is extremely simple. Axios can intercept, transform, update and cancel requests with ease and makes online data fetching easier than ever before.

https://www.npmjs.com/package/axios

4. CLSX

With over 1 million weekly downloads, clsx is an extremely useful and compact package used for constructing className strings conditionally in react. CLSX allows you to use simple JSX fundamentals to manipulate the className that is passed to a component in order to dynamically render styling to a page. This tool will allow you to create extremely complex UI interactions with virtually no headache. Anyone trying to take their code to the next level should check it out.

https://www.npmjs.com/package/clsx

5. Prop-Types

Prop-Types gets over 4 million downloads every week, and for great reason. Prop-Types is a runtime type checking tool used for React props and other similar JavaScript objects. The implementation of the prop-types package will make your React code more type safe and make your code cleaner and easier to follow.

https://www.npmjs.com/package/prop-types

6. React-Router

React-Router is a must know package for any serious React developer. It is a package that handles declarative routing for React. With a clean and simple design, handling routes across your web application has never been easier. This package makes conditionally rendering components and controlling URLs within the single-page ecosystem of React simpler than ever.

https://www.npmjs.com/package/react-router

7. React-Use

React-use is the greatest collection of react hooks known to mankind. With tons of custom built hooks, you can control audio, animations, video, scrolling, geolocation and much more. Almost every project could benefit from at least one hook that is provided in this library. The possibilities are seemingly endless and every React developer should be aware of all the tools made available to them through this amazing package!

https://www.npmjs.com/package/react-use

8. Lodash

Lodash is the ultimate modern JavaScript utility library that delivers modularity, performance and more. With hundreds of different utility functions that work on arrays, objects, strings and more, the usefulness of Lodash cannot be overstated. Lodash makes it easier than ever to run complex operations in JavaScript with no worry or headache on optimization or what’s going on behind the scenes. If you don’t know about Lodash already, you need to catch up!

https://lodash.com/

9. React-Bootstrap

React bootstrap is an extremely popular front end framework for building bootstrap applications in React. With a very long list of components, you can build beautiful modals, forms, spinners, tabs and much more with just a few lines of clean code. Building good looking UI has never been easier, any junior designer can utilize React-Bootstrap to make their web applications look clean and professional.

https://react-bootstrap.github.io/components/alerts

10. ESLint

ESLint is a configurable linter tool for identifying and reporting patterns inside of JavaScript code. Put simply, ESLint is the easiest way to make sure you are writing clean, easy to read code without much headache. You can configure it to your needs and ensure that the code you write follows the correct design patterns. Find and fix your JavaScript problems quickly and easily with ESLint on every React project you create!

https://eslint.org/

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