ReactTemplate VS craco

I've never found CRA makes project management any easier (aside from the first few days after setting up a new project). In the long run it's always been a pain as it prevents you from touching most of the config. Personally I use this ReactTemplate which uses many of the same tools as CRA but with everything exposed and much more sensible defaults so it's easy to configure for whatever you want and nothing is forced upon you.

Most people have only ever used Webpack via CRA which is a terribly optimized config. If you design your own Webpack config it can be so fast that you won't notice it. (Example)

I recommend setting up tsconfig with strict mode enabled and ESLint and TypeScript ESLint rules to be fairly strict. This is a great way to learn with guard rails as it'll slap you when you try to do something which is unsafe or too loosely typed. Here's a reference ESLint config that is frequently updated with any newly released rules that fit well. This happens to be for a TypeScript React project, but you can always trim out the rules from plugins that aren't relevant for you.

Don't forget ESLint. Arguably more important than many of those other things for fixing the common mistakes that most developers make. And note that the recommended ESLint configs are incredibly conservative so you probably want to customize the rules to get much higher quality. An example of one of my recommended React/TypeScript ESLint configs.

And then I have a ton of code-level tools and configs that I use all the time. Many of which are in this React Template if you want to pick through it. There's code spellcheckers, dependency update checkers, extensive linting configs and more.

If you want a reference, take a look at this eslint config for some good rules to use.

If you want a reference, this ReactTemplate is very simple and in many cases can be used as a drop-in for CRA.

No reason to go overkill with a metaframework. All you need is a new build config. That's all CRA is, a collection of configuration files. I choose to just configure what I need myself so I have control over it and can easily customize it and get all of the features and performance that I want if I want it. The content of your app shouldn't need to change just because your build process changes. (If you want a reference, here's the React Template I start with.)

Yeah here's the config from my open source React Template: https://github.com/CreativeTechGuy/ReactTemplate/blob/main/.eslintrc.js

PS: If you are curious, this is my React Template that I was describing above.

I had some 'fun' figuring out how to deal with not going through create-react-app without doing a full eject, got something barely working ... and discovered https://craco.js.org/ already existed and did precisely what I'd part-implemented except better.

On the upside, by that point I knew the CRA codebase well enough to predict what it would do even in edge cases, and CRACO's implementation was immediately comprehensible, and none of my colleagues had to try and understand my half-arsed NIH version.

(avoiding being in any of this situation in the first place would likely have been preferable, but given where things were when I landed on the project in question that would've required a TARDIS)

If you initiated your React application using create-react-app, leverage @craco/craco to override your webpack configuration.

Ejecting a React app is a bad idea because our application will lose all the React configurations and will not benefit from the CRA updates. Some solutions for ejecting our application include using packages like react-app-rewired or rewire. You can also use CRACO to eject your React application, but it needs you to install additional plugins.

So, instead of entirely managing these configuration files, teams took to utilizing tools such as Craco to override configurations. These tools also come with their limitations: they were not updated as quickly as CRA, so there was always a lag in implementing new features, and they added an extra layer of complexity to existing tools through overrides and additional tools.

I am not much of a fan of CRA myself but I am very much glad that https://craco.js.org exists - so far it's handled my needs for tweaking CRA behaviour in situations where "eject" didn't seem like a good route to take.

Mostly tbh to stop the freaking thing spawning inotify watchers for the entire contents of node_modules - I don't mind having to do a manual restart when I've changed dependencies and I definitely -do- mind having it eat a shedload of my user's inotify kernel allocation. (I know you can up the allocation, that's not the point, why are you on my lawn? :)

As I mentioned, in our case, the perfect tool for this job is CRACO. It will let us simply overwrite CRA’s configuration without ejecting.

Create react app + Craco

Or I could use Craco with Craco-less. Craco 6+ doesn't work with 5+ versions of react-scripts. I know I could use yarn instead of NPM which doesn't stop the installation of craco, but it can't be the solution. We can't scrap the project and restart. Further, Craco 7-alpha installs but then craco-less doesn't.

If you want to customize the webpack configuration, you either need to eject, or to work against the package (with yarn patch, forking react-scripts, or using CRACO which is the easiest). But none of them are officially maintained by the CRA team.