Creating a new app in the current directory

$ mkdir app
$ cd app
$ git init .
$ create-react-app .
> The directory `.` already exists. Aborting.

It would be nice if this worked

[lacker]

Currently the behavior is that you can only run create-react-app in a nonexistent directory. It doesn’t let you run in an already-existing directory because you don’t want to accidentally splat these files into somewhere like ~.

But, if we let you run create-react-app in an empty directory, I think that would be ok. I think it would also be OK if there was a readme / readme.md and dotfiles like .gitignore in the directory. That makes things work with a workflow where you first create a new repo on github, you clone it to your local machine, and then you run create-react-app. It’s hard for me to imagine a case where that causes you much pain.

[vjeux]

If we’re in the game of guessing things that would not conflict, I would only check if there’s a package.json file. If that’s the case, then it’s probably unsafe, otherwise should be good to go.