Learn How To Build: Astronomy Picture of the Day App With NASA API and React + Redux — Part I

Demo

I recently found out that NASA has a public API. Cool! Let’s build something with the API today!

What are we going to build? We’re going to build an app called astronomy picture of the day!

Prerequisites

Basic JavasScript experience.

We are using React for building the application UI, Axios for fetching data and Redux for managing our application state.

Also, let’s not forget about Webpack, which will compile it all down for our browser. Great workflow!

Step 1 — Scaffolding

Please grab our Webpack config from this repository.

1. We’re going to rename the current project to nasa-react-redux.
2. Change directory, jump to branch chapter-5 and do a git pull origin chapter-5.
3. Remove .git since we don’t want our little project to be associated with the Webpack guide repository.
4. Install npm dependencies: npm install or npm i for short.

Let’s boot up our Webpack config and open the project with our favourite text editor.

The command to boot up Webpack is npm run start and you should see something like the following if everything works correctly.