craco VS create-react-app

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.

I could totally see how you'd arrive there. Backstory:

create-react was a starter boilerplate for React built and maintained by Facebook. This was when webpack was the standard and just getting a local development environment to "hello world" for React could be challenging.[1]

That project was depreciated and the popularity of the Next.js site framework for react projects (plus I certainly assume heavy lobbying from Vercel) pushed the react docs to officially suggest create-next as the new starting point.[2]

Note that there are many other ways to start a react project and there are also many react projects that don't use or need Nextjs. (I use react quite a bit but I pair it with Astro.js, for example.)

I would say that a lightweight Vite template is really all you need for a lot of early success with a local environment for learning / building with React.

[1] https://github.com/facebook/create-react-app

Setting up a ReactJS app can be done using different methods. Developers have various options ranging from using create React App (CRA), using Vite, or any other method they are familiar with. Once the ReactJS app is integrated, installing Tailwind CSS as a dev dependency is pretty straight forward. The guide provided in the Tailwind CSS documentation is easy to read and quick to understand let’s break down the steps.

My website's previous iteration was built in 2021. It was bootstrapped using (the now deprecated) Create React App and it took approximately 2 months to build. The home page included a bunch of photos that I had taken myself of my desk and keyboard as background for several sections and it included most of the information on the website. In the middle of the page I put the SkillsTerminal (which also features in the current version), which provided visitors with a familiar and mobile-ready UI which included my tech skills, aswell as a bit of information on my work and project history.

Pleased to say I had a meaningful hand in this :) As some background, this finally happened because:

- React 19 broke CRA

- I griped about it loudly on Bluesky (https://bsky.app/profile/acemarke.dev/post/3lggg6pk7g22o) and that started a long debate

- I filed an umbrella issue describing the specific breakage and recommending an actual official deprecation announcement (https://github.com/facebook/create-react-app/issues/17004)

- The React team finally took action to fix the CRA breakage, then wrote the blog post, updated the setup docs page, and redid the docs SEO to get Google to stop showing the legacy docs as a search result.

So, kudos to the React team for making meaningful changes here!

(It's not _exactly_ what I was hoping for, and I gave them some additional review feedback that they didn't include, but gotta give credit for the actual changes and steps forward!)

Create React App should not be used because it is no longer maintained. Here is its GitHub repro: https://github.com/facebook/create-react-app/commits/main/ . It has had very few updates since July 2022. This is bad because it needs constant updates because it depends on a large number of packages and those packages are constantly releasing security updates.

Not so fast, though. V0 uses shadcn, which isn’t fully compatible with Create React App.

Don’t use Create React App: It’s outdated, slow, and lacks extensibility.

The application was created with Create React App, a JavaScript library for building user interfaces. I separated the different moving parts of the application and put them into the following React components.