craco VS open-props

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.

There's still some boilerplate, but I'm a big fan of Open Props[0] because it takes a hybrid approach. CSS isn't necessarily reinventing the wheel, but allowing for easier / more powerful approaches to difficult layouts or things that would otherwise require JS. Bootstrap is fine but troubleshooting advanced layout issues involves a lot of inspecting elements to see what styles are actually being applied (at least in my experience, YMMV) so I'd personally always bet on CSS.

[0] https://open-props.style/

I don't quite get the hate for having CSS in another file. Do you also put all your react stuff in one single file ? That same logic and argument can be applied against all modularization.

And really 20-50 tailwind classes in a single element is VERY hard to read and keep in mind. No - it does not make things clear or understandable. One tends to need to re-read and scan over from the beginning and eyes glaze over. Esp if some elements only vary with a few classes missing. I guess it works for people with very high attention to detail and high amount of working memory. I only find it personally frustrating.

Maybe tailwind css works for some bright people. I did try it for a couple of projects and only felt pain.

However, the "atomic css" philosophy behind tailwind is great. I find framewroks like https://open-props.style/ far better to use.

Open Props adds to the set by providing extra custom properties for things like easing functions or animations.

> If you wanted to actually solve theming, what you should work for is not a constrained helper function like light-dark(), but instead a shared token schema. Today nearly every company has their own token schema and different ways of naming things in the semantic token layer. If we had a shard language here, not only would it be trivial to add light/dark theming (just redefine a few variables that are already provided for you), code could be shared between sites and inherit the theming/branding.

Isn't that the idea behind https://open-props.style/ (and https://theme-ui.com/ in JS land)?

I think it's a great idea, but hampered by the lack of adoption incentives for the very people that need to adopt it for it to become successful (design system/component library authors). It introduces constraints, but the promised interoperability is not really beneficial to the people who need to work within those constraints.

I do think that the real value of Tailwind comes from the utility classes, rather than css-in-html paradigm. You could achieve the same, for example, with Pollen.css [0] or Open Props [1].

[0] https://github.com/heybokeh/pollen

[1] https://github.com/argyleink/open-props

If you choose to style with plain CSS you can add design tokens as CSS variables with Open Props: https://open-props.style.

Some time ago I discovered Open Props which provides a lot of design tokens as CSS variables and started using it in some of my projects.

CSS: Open Props (https://open-props.style/)

https://open-props.style/ gives you design tokens as CSS variables. It’s CSS only and not Svelte specific.