craco VS vite

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.

import { defineConfig } from 'vite' import react from '@vitejs/plugin-react-swc' import path from 'path' // https://vitejs.dev/config/ export default defineConfig({ plugins: [react()], server: { port: 3000 }, css: { devSourcemap: true }, resolve: { alias: { '~': path.resolve(__dirname, './src') } } })

I am currently utilizing Vite:

Homepage: https://vitejs.dev/

Without any adding any dependencies you can connect react props to raw css at runtime with nothing but css variables (aka "custom properties"). If you add CSS modules on top you don't have to worry about affecting the global scope so components created in this way can be truly modular and transferrable. I use this with vite.

Little confused as to why it has vite in it‘s name, it seems unrelated to https://vitejs.dev/

it says in their docs that they recommend Vite https://vitejs.dev/

it goes like this.

1. you create a repo folder, you cd into it.

2. you create a client template using vite which can be plain typescript, or uses frameworks such as react or vue, at https://vitejs.dev/guide/

3. you cd in that client directory, you npm install, then you npm run dev, it should show you that it works at localhost:5173

4. you follow the instructions on your url, you do npm install @web3modal/wagmi @wagmi/core @wagmi/connectors viem

5. you follow the further instructions.

> It seems like this is for npm or yarn to pull from a remote repository maintained by @wagmi for instance. But then what?

you install the wagmi modules, then you import them in your js code, those code can run upon being loaded or upon user actions such as button clicks

> Do I just symlink to the node_modules directory somehow? Use browserify? Or these days I'd use webpack or whatever the cool kids are using these days?

no need for those. browserify is old school way of transpiling commonjs modules into browser-compatible modules. webpack is similar. vite replaces both webpack and browserify. vite also uses esbuild and swc under the hood which replaces babel.

> I totally get how node package management works ... for NODE. But all these client-side JS projects these days have docs that are clearly for the client-side but the ES2015 module examples they show seem to leave out all instructions for how to actually get the files there, as if it's obvious.

pretty much similar actually. except on client-side, you have src and dist folders. when you run "npm run build" vite will compile the src dir into dist dir. the outputs are the static files that you can serve with any http server such as npx serve, or caddy, or anything really.

> What gives? And finally, what exactly does "browserify" do these days, since I think Node supports both ES modules and and CJS modules? I also see sometimes UMD universal modules

vite supports both ecmascript modules and commonjs modules. but these days you'll just want to stick with ecmascript which makes your code consistently use import and export syntax, and you get the extra benefit of it working well with your vscode intellisense.

> In short, I'm a bit confused how to use package management properly with browsers in 2024: https://modern-web.dev/guides/going-buildless/es-modules/

if people want plain js there is unpkg.com and esm.sh way, but the vite route is the best for you as it's recommended and tested by the providers of your modules.

> And finally, if you answer this, can you spare a word about typescript? Do we still need to use Babel and Webpack together to transpile it to JS, and minify and tree-shake, or what?

I recommend typescript, as it gives you better type-safety and better intellisense, but it really depends. If you're new to it, it can slow you down at first. But as your project grows you'll eventually see the value of it. In vite there are options to scaffold your project in pure js or ts.

First you have to know that all those react projects are created using Vite, and for each of them, you need change the vite.config.ts file by adding the following configuration:

CSSHooks works with React, Prereact, Solid.js, and Qwik, and we’re going to use Vite with the React configuration. First, let's create a project called css-hooks and install Vite:

JavaScript React Flowbite Tailwind Firebase - Auth, Database, and Hosting Vite

For this full-stack single-page app, you'll use Vite.js as your frontend build tool and the react-beautiful-dnd package for draggable items.