Rails 5.2 App with Webpacker and React - Part 1

This is the first part in a short series we're doing on building a rails app with a React enabled frontend. There are a number of ways to utilize React in a Rails 5.2 application, and after toying with different ideas and approaches we landed on using the webpacker gem to get things going with webpack as a monolith instead of having separate applications for frontend and backend.