Gatsby VS craco

I initially built the site using a static site technology called Gatsby, not realizing that it was actually a dead project. After a little research, I found that Next.js is a pretty popular alternative for building a static site, so I set myself to the task of porting it.

After Netlify’s acquisition of Gatsby, the framework’s development trajectory shifted. With a focus on integrating with Netlify’s ecosystem, Gatsby’s innovation appears to be gone. Throughout the entire 2024 we’ve seen only 1 minor update in the 5.x branch and even that consists mainly of bumped dependencies and small fixes:

Marking the first days and months of 2024 I started a site to host articles and blogs and what I called uploadz and missivz. I am using Astro having migrated from Gatsby in years previous. Astro is arguably faster to compile static sites and has a simpler, cleaner, in my view, way of creating simple component based web pages. It has the capability of embedding 'islands' of react, svelte, even plain Javascript and far more without having to go full on SPA if you don't want to. This was too tempting not to take a look and quite frankly I got hooked. Whilst I don't use a fraction of what Astro has to offer it has become a go-to for me for not just static sites but also to create POCs, quick Demos and more. It also has become the basis of a lightweight content management system I am developing and have implemented this year for clients and a non-profit. The CMS I refer to uses a back-end written in Laravel.

Gatsby: Primarily a static site generator, but also supports SSR.

It is a collection of beautifully designed user interface (UI) components that you can easily copy and paste into your applications. Developers can use it with any framework that supports React, like Next, Gatsby, Remix, and others.

Gatsby Official Documentation

My previous website used the Gatsby framework, for a simple reason: I am very familiar with React, so I thought customization would be easier. However, I later realized I didnt have time to maintain a bunch of Typescript and Javascript, which made me reluctant to update my website. This time, I choose Hugo. Maintaining a small amount of Go Template is easier, and I am familiar with Golang, too.

Gatsby: A static site generator ideal for content-heavy websites, offering performance optimizations out of the box. Gatsby Documentation

**Gatsby** is optimized for building fast static websites and apps with a focus on performance and SEO. It uses GraphQL for data management.

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.