webpack VS craco

The JS SDK now lets you opt out of specific modules you don't need and optimize the final bundle size. You can do that by using either of two popular JavaScript build tools: Rollup or Webpack.

Webpack: A bundler for managing and optimizing module dependencies. Learn More

Description: A module bundler that compiles JavaScript modules (along with assets like styles and images) into a single bundle or multiple bundles for optimized loading. It also supports hot reloading and code splitting. Use Cases: Bundling and optimizing JavaScript files for production, often used in larger web projects. Website: Webpack

Webpack official website

For its part, Next.js is the most popular React framework. As any other JavaScript application that uses a bundler such as webpack or Vite, for production a compiled version of the project is used. This is known as build. A build aims to provide the minimum amount of code needed for the application to function the same as it does in development. This ensures that JavaScript files are very lightweight, allowing the browser to fetch and interpret them in the shortest possible time to render the user interface or perform whatever tasks the application requires."

Webpack manages standalone applications.

Previously, Strapi used Webpack, a free and open-source module bundler for JavaScript.

Webpack is a module bundler used to build modern JavaScript applications. It allows developers to compile modules and optimize assets in an application. A key feature of Webpack is that it is flexible in its customization, which enables it to be suitable for both small- and large-scale applications. You can install Webpack by running the command below:

Additional Resources Google Lighthouse WebPageTest TinyPNG Webpack Documentation Service Worker API

If you're working with a modern web framework like React or Vue, you might be using something like Webpack or Rollup to bundle your assets. These tools are great, but a simpler approach to managing assets exists. This is where DAM can complement your existing build process.

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.