How to avoid using relative path imports (/../../../redux/action/action1) in create-react-app

Question

I've been using create-react-app package for creating a react website. I was using relative paths throughout my app for importing components, resources, redux etc. eg, import action from '../../../redux/action

I have tried using module-alis npm package but with no success. Is there any plugin that I can use to import based on the folder name or alias i.e. an absolute path?

Eg., import action from '@redux/action' or import action from '@resource/css/style.css'

Answer 1

Create a file called .env in the project root and write there:

NODE_PATH=src 

Then restart the development server. You should be able to import anything inside src without relative paths.

Note I would not recommend calling your folder src/redux because now it is confusing whether redux import refers to your app or the library. Instead you can call your folder src/app and import things from app/....

We intentionally don't support custom syntax like @redux because it's not compatible with Node resolution algorithm.

Answer 2

The approach in the accepted answer has now been superseded. Create React App now has a different way to set absolute paths as documented here.

To summarise, you can configure your application to support importing modules using absolute paths by doing the following:

Create/Edit your jsconfig.json/tsconfig.json in the root of your project with the following:

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

Once you have done this you can then import by specifying subdirectories of "src" (in the following example, components is a subdirectory of src) e.g.

import Button from 'components/Button'