concurrently VS cross-env

Before we begin, it's essential to ensure that we have Tailwind CSS and Concurrently installed. Tailwind CSS utility classes will be used for styling our project and will not affect the functionality. Concurrently will allow us to run our React frontend and server file simultaneously on our machines. For now, knowing the purpose that Concurrently serves is enough. We will see how to make it work later in the article.

To efficiently develop and test these applications, it’s essential to run React and Express servers simultaneously. One option is to manually start each server using separate terminal windows or tabs, but this approach is cumbersome and inefficient. An option is to use the concurrently or npm-run-all  CLI tools designed to run multiple npm-scripts in parallel or sequentially.

Let's configure our scripts in the package.json file to launch JSON-Server, to make the process easier we will use Concurrently, an NPM package that allow us to run multiple commands simultaneously.

[1] https://metatype.dev [2] https://github.com/metatypedev/metatype/blob/main/whiz.yaml [3] https://actix.rs/docs/actix/actor/ [4] https://github.com/open-cli-tools/concurrently

Lastly if you want to run your dev build tool and backend as a single command you could try something like pm2 (https://www.npmjs.com/package/pm2) or concurrently (https://www.npmjs.com/package/concurrently). This isn't necessary but might be a nice-to-have. NPM workspaces could help you organize this with a common package.json file too. (https://docs.npmjs.com/cli/v7/using-npm/workspaces)

We attempted to use a combination of tsc --watch, concurrently and Nodemon, but started to run into things breaking left and right, e.g.

Now, the tsconfig.vitest.json seems to be the most "complete" (it will check app files as well as test files), so it's a good choice if you really had to choose one config and run with it (and you still get type checking in the IDE for each config). But, this doesn't include the files from tsconfig.config.json, and as an app grows, the "app" and "vitest" configs may diverge, so wouldn't it be best to use something like concurrently or npm-run-all to run vue-tsc against all 3 configs?

cross-env

or if we care about cross-platform compatibility (i.e. Windows support), we can use cross-env (which I also recommend to install as a dev dependency):

i like to use dotenv-flow and dynamically load it into node process. it's framework agnostic and can be combined with vaious other strategies, like explicitly set NODE_ENV with cross-env. all you need is the right command in your package.json, see a sample here.

Cross-env runs scripts that set and use environment variables across various platforms.

You will also need to disable the url-loader in your Docusaurus build which transforms images into base64 strings, as this will conflict with the plugin. There isn't a first class way to do this in Docusaurus at present. However by setting the environment variable WEBPACK_URL_LOADER_LIMIT to 0 you can disable it. You can see an implementation example in this pull request. It amounts to adding the cross-env package and then adding the following to your package.json:

Using the cross-env library, you'll tell the React Testing Library to skip auto cleanup after each test. More info and ways to configure here: Skipping Auto Cleanup. Now your configuration is enough to start writing tests, let's get started.

Now we need to load the files during the bootup. Windows environments sometimes face issues with loading the environments. To take care of that, let's install a package named cross-env

build; sets and enviroment valiable of NODE_ENV=production using cross-env lib and builds the production bundle, minified and without source-maps as set in the webpack.config.js file.

I'd suggest the cross-env NPM package which is used a lot (4M downlaods/week). Then you can just change it to the following:

Debugging Cypress tests using Visual Studio Code was possible earlier but with the latest version of Cypress, there is no direct way to do so. Even with the latest version of Cypress, a workaround was possible using Debugger for Chrome – a Visual Studio Code Extension and cross-env npm package. However, the Debugger for Chrome Extension for Visual Studio Code is deprecated and the cross-env npm package has gone into maintenance mode.