I have just started learning React, and Facebook helps in simplifying the initial setup by providing the following ready-made project.
If I have to install the skeleton project I have to type npx create-react-app my-app in command-line.
I was wondering why does the Facebook in Github have npx create-react-app my-app rather than npm create-react-app my-app?
npx is a npm package runner (x probably stands for eXecute). One common way to use npx is to download and run a package temporarily or for trials.
create-react-app is an npm package that is expected to be run only once in a project's lifecycle. Hence, it is preferred to use npx to install and run it in a single step.
As mentioned in the main page https://www.npmjs.com/package/npx, npx can run commands in the PATH or from node_modules/.bin by default.
Note: With some digging, we can find that create-react-app points to a Javascript file (possibly to /usr/lib/node_modules/create-react-app/index.js on Linux systems) that is executed within the node environment. This is simply a global tool that does some checks. The actual setup is done by react-scripts, whose latest version is installed in the project. Refer https://github.com/facebook/create-react-app for more info.
NPM is a package manager, you can install node.js packages using NPM
NPX is a tool to execute node.js packages.
It doesn't matter whether you installed that package globally or locally. NPX will temporarily install it and run it. NPM also can run packages if you configure a package.json file and include it in the script section.
So remember this, if you want to check/run a node package quickly without installing locally or globally use NPX.
npM - Manager
npX - Execute - easy to remember