react-app-rewired VS craco

Further information here: https://github.com/timarney/react-app-rewired

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.

When created I remove react-script package and copies build dependencies, configuration files and scripts into the app directory. It is needed to modify webpack.config file. (Another solution is to use react-app-rewired

Heads up: CRA5 bumped their webpack dependency to a version that no longer supports node polyfills in browsers. This breaks the builds of nearly all Ethereum-related projects today. A common workaround that avoids ejecting is to hook into the CRA build process. We’re using react-app-rewired but you could simply stay at CRA4 until the community comes up with a better solution.

CRA is good to get something running quick (and it uses webpack underneat!). In the past I've tweaked the webpack config using things like https://github.com/timarney/react-app-rewired when needed, but for all my "serious" projects I ended up ejecting and learning webpack! For my next project I'll try to skip CRA altogether!

// Overrides create-react-app webpack configs without ejecting // https://github.com/timarney/react-app-rewired const { addBabelPlugins, override } = require("customize-cra"); module.exports = override( ...addBabelPlugins( "babel-plugin-myPlugin" /* Add plug-in names here (separate each value by a comma) */ ) );

If Create React App supported Yarn workspaces out-of-the-box, what we've done so far would have been enough to run the app... unfortunately, it doesn't. Luckily, we can use CRACO (or other tools such as customize-cra or react-app-rewired) to customize the Webpack configuration used by Create React App to resolve packages imported from other workspaces.

<--- JS stacktrace ---> FATAL ERROR: Ineffective mark-compacts near heap limit Allocation failed - JavaScript heap out of memory 1: 00007FF69616B9CF v8::internal::CodeObjectRegistry::~CodeObjectRegistry+112159 2: 00007FF6960FCA26 v8::internal::MicrotaskQueue::GetMicrotasksScopeDepth+65430 3: 00007FF6960FD90D node::OnFatalError+301 4: 00007FF696A91BAE v8::Isolate::ReportExternalAllocationLimitReached+94 5: 00007FF696A783AD v8::SharedArrayBuffer::Externalize+78 [1]: https://github.com/timarney/react-app-rewired

Enter react-app-rewired. What this package does is it allows you to hook into the Webpack config process so you can change settings, add loaders or plugins, and so on. It's like having all the pros of ejecting (mainly, access to the webpack.config.js) without actually ejecting.

Switch to craco from react-app-rewired for better CRA v4 support (breaking change!)

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.