# Creating a React project structure from scratch
Before we start building something, we first need to know what React is, for that we'll use the self [ReactJS](https://reactjs.org/docs/getting-started.html) definition.
> “React is a JavaScript library for building user interfaces.”
With React we can break our code into reusable components, making the code easy to scale and to maintain. This is just to briefly understand what's React.
## How-to create a basic React project structure
First of all we need to create the directory our project will reside in.
```bash
mkdir basic-structure
```
After creating the directory, we need to use `npm` or `yarn` to initialize the project (we'll use yarn).
```bash
yarn init -y
```
This will create a `package.json` file that should look like this:
We'll use three dependencies: `parcel-bundler`, `react` and `react-dom`. Add this dependencies with your package manager.
```bash
yarn add parcel-bundler react react-dom
```
`parcel-bundler` is an application bundler, this will help us to translate React to JS using Babel under the hood. Also, with parcel we'll create a server to run our project.
We can now proceed to create some directories. A `src` directory where all our source code will live, and a `public` directory where all our static files will be.
For our site to work, we'll need to have an `index.html` file that will be in the `public` directory, and for React to work we'll need to create the main `app.js` file under the `src` directory (it can have another name).
After all, we should have a project structure that looks like this:
Now, we just need to create a basic HTML structure with a `` inside the body. After the `div` we need to link the JS file using ``. This should look like this:
Next, we create our simple React.
Finally, using `yarn parcel path/to/index.html` (you can use `npm` too) we should see our project up and running.
And that's it! We learned how to create a basic react project structure.