create-react-app with --typescript doesn't work when installed globally - update docs accordingly

Is this a bug report?

No - documentation issue.

Did you try recovering your dependencies?

No. Not the issue.

Not relevant. (Write your answer here.)

Which terms did you search for in User Guide?

The user guide is incorrect, by your own statement here: https://github.com/facebook/create-react-app/issues/6319#issuecomment-459627529 - unfortunately, this wasn’t ever corrected, and I believe the behavior is still actually broken, aside from the docs not being updated.

Not relevant. (Write your answer here if relevant.)

Environment

Not relevant.

Steps to Reproduce

(Write your steps here:)

Expected Behavior

(Write what you thought would happen.)

Actual Behavior

(Write what happened. Please add screenshots!)

Reproducible Demo

(Paste the link to an example project and exact instructions to reproduce the issue.)

TL; DR:

This was closed: https://github.com/facebook/create-react-app/issues/6319

This was the answer given: https://github.com/facebook/create-react-app/issues/6319#issuecomment-459627529 - which works, but doesn’t match what the docs say (despite the answer explicitly stating so).

This is still wrong: https://facebook.github.io/create-react-app/docs/adding-typescript

I’d be happy to submit a pull request to update the documentation to provide a warning about this, but as it stands you’re likely to keep getting bug reports about it.

I’ve found at least 3 of them myself.

[iansu]

That sounds reasonable. Please send a PR for the docs.

[methodbox]

There’s isn’t a need to explicitly install CRA globally anymore with npx available. Using npx ensure you always use the latest version of our CLI w whenever you are bootstrapping a new app.

While I appreciate that, as you can see that wasn’t my first move; I took the “old school” approach and relied on the fact that I already had it installed globally, looked up the flag for installing using TS and it didn’t work.

I went and found a GitHub issue that described the issue I was having, and here we are. I never looked at your home page in the docs because I wasn’t pointed there and my Google search didn’t return that result, it returned the GH issue. (I’m saying this as an example of how user interaction would commonly go, not as a complaint).

When viewing the GitHub page I’m suggesting to update, there was no indication that having CRA installed globally would cause the issue I am seeing.

It might be worth updating the docs, specifically that page as well, to indicate what you just said. It’s not clear that having it installed globally would cause a conflict.

You have this on the Getting Started page, I’m simply suggesting to add it to the TS page, as well, maybe with a note about possible conflict:

If you’ve previously installed create-react-app globally via npm install -g create-react-app, we recommend you uninstall the package using npm uninstall -g create-react-app to ensure that npx always uses the latest version.