How to create and run a development build of an application using create-react-app configuration

This is not really doable with just create-react-app, there is an open issue Here and it doesn’t look like it will be added anytime soon.

However, you can use a package called dotenv for that, following are the steps you should take:

• Install dotenv (make sure to add save dev) npm install dotenv-cli --save-dev

• In package.json scripts section add new script: "build:dev": "dotenv -e .env.development react-scripts build",

• And you can build for development with npm run build:dev

PS: if you want to avoid mistakenly deploying dev builds to production (as mentioned here) you can add build:prod to package.json and disable the regular build command, see code:

"build:dev": "dotenv -e .env.development react-scripts build",
"build:prod": "dotenv -e .env.production react-scripts build",
"build": "echo \"Please use build:dev or build:prod \" && exit 1",

Also note that process.env.NODE_ENV will still be production but it’ll load your .env.development file