turborepo VS create-react-app

GitHub: vercel/turborepo

When you setup a monorepo using turbo, the basic template gives you 3 packages by default. This can be found in turborepo/examples/basic.

Next, let’s create monorepo with Turborepo.

> Look at the dependency tree for a next

Looks ok to me: https://npmgraph.js.org/?q=next

Ironically, most of the dependencies are actually Rust crates used by swc and turbopack [1]. Try running cargo tree on either of those crates, it's enlightening to say the least. And of course, Node has a built in file watcher, and even the most popular third party package for file watching (Chokidar) has a single dependency [3].

[1] https://github.com/vercel/turborepo/blob/main/Cargo.toml

[2] https://github.com/swc-project/swc/blob/main/Cargo.toml

[3] https://npmgraph.js.org/?q=chokidar

Turborepo: Smart build system for JavaScript/TypeScript monorepos

We’ve only scratched the surface of what we can do with Turborepo. You can find more examples in the Turborepo examples directory on GitHub. Skill Recordings on GitHub is also another great resource that has been around since Turborepo was first released.

git clone https://github.com/vercel/turborepo.git

I use https://turborepo.org/ to facilitate my monorepo. Essentially it's a way of structuring your configs, UI; apps etc and you consume each like an internal package. I find benefits for this as the kinds of sites I make will generally have an internal app, an admin panel and a marketing site. I can write UI, config etc in one place and consume them over the three projects to keep everything consistent.

The latest addition to the Composer Suite monorepo, Turborepo optimizes monorepo workflows by caching build artifacts. This may sound a little abstract and boring, but what this actually means is that when you build something within your monorepo, Turborepo will make sure only the things that it depends on are rebuilt; everything else will be retrieved from a cache that either lives on your local computer, or a remote cache server. Adding Turborepo to the Composer Suite monorepo pretty much halved CI build times, but it was also a way to teach Vercel, which I use for hosting the various example apps in the repo, to only actually deploy the ones that have changed since their last deployment. And that's really cool!

This project was bootstrapped with Create React App.

I used create-react-app and removed the boilerplate to start a blank application. The goal is to search a user with https://api.github.com/users/ and present the result.

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.