10 Reasons I Love create-react-app

I now have two finished side projects (1 & 2) done and deployed based on create-react-app which I've kinda fallen in love with. Here are my reasons why I love create-react-app:

1. It Just Works

That wonderful Applesque feeling of "Man! That wasn't hard at all!". It's been such a solid experience with so few hiccups that I'm tickled really impressed. I think it works so well because it's a big project (174 contributors at the time of writing) and the scope is tight. Many other modern web framework boilerplatey projects feels like "This is how I do it. See if you like it. But you better think like I do."

2. No Hard Decisions To Be Made

Webpack still intimidates me. Babel still intimidates me. ESlint still intimidates me. I know how to use all three but whenever I do I feel like I'm not doing it right and that I'm missing out on something that everyone else knows. create-react-app encompasses all of these tools with a set of hard defaults. I know the Babel it ships with just works and I know that it isn't configured to support decorators but it works nicely and so far I've not had any desires to extend it.

Some people will get claustrophic not being able to configure things. But I'm "a making kinda person" so I like this focus on shipping rather than doing it the rightest way. In fact, I think it's a feature that you can't configure things in create-react-app. The option to yarn run eject isn't really an option because once you've ejected, and now can configure, you're no longer using create-react-app.

3. I Feel Like I'm Using Up-to-date Tech/Tools

I've tried other React (and AngularJS) boilerplate projects before and once started you always get nervous upgrading underlying bits with fear that it's going to stop working. Once you start a create-react-app project there are only two (three technically) things you need to update in your package.json and that's react-scripts and react (and react-dom technically).

If you read about a new cool way of doing something with Webpack|Babel|ESlint most likely that will be baked into react-scripts soon for you. So just stay cool and stay up to date.

By the way, as a side-note. If you've gotten used to keeping your package.json up to date with npm outdated make sure you switch to yarn and run yarn outdated. With yarn outdated it only checks the packages you've listed in package.json against npmjs.com. With npm oudated it will mention dependencies within listed packages that are outdated and that's really hard to evaluate.

4. The Server Proxy

Almost all my recent projects are single-page apps that load a behemoth of .js code and once started it starts getting data from a REST server built in Django or Go or something. So, realistically the app looks like this:

  componentDidMount() {
    fetch('/api/userdata/')
    .then(r = r.json())
    .then(response => {
      this.setState({userData: response.user_data})
    })
  }

With create-react-app you just add this line to your package.json:

"proxy": "http://localhost:8000"

Now, when you open http://localhost:3000 in the browser and the AJAX kicks off the browser thinks it's talking to http://localhost:3000/api/userdata/ but the Node server that create-react-app ships with just automatically passes that on to http://localhost:8000/api/userdata/. (This example just changes the port but note that it's a URL so the domain can be different too).

Now you don't have to worry about CORS or having to run everything via a local Nginx and use rewrite rules to route the /api/* queries.

5. One Page Documentation

This single page is all you need.

At the time of writing that documentation uses npm instead of yarn and I don't know why that is but, anyways, it's nice that it's all there in one single page. To find out how to do something I can just ⌘-f and find.

6. Has Nothing To Do With SCSS, Less or PostCSS

SCSS, Less and PostCSS are amazing but don't work with create-react-app. You have to use good old CSS. Remember that one? This is almost always fine by me because the kinds of changes I make to the CSS are mainly nudging one margin here or floating one div there. For that it's fine to keep is simple.

Although I haven't used it yet I'm very intrigued to use styled components as a really neat trick to style things in a contained and decentralized way that looks neat.

7. Has Nothing To Do With Redux, react-router or MobX

I'm sure you've seen it too. You discover some juicy looking React boilerplate project that looks really powerful but then you discover that it "forces" you to use Redux|react-router|MobX. Individually these are amazing libraries but if the boilerplate forces a choice that will immediately put some people off and the boilerplate project will immediately suffer from lack of users/contributors because it made a design decision too early.

It's really not hard to chose one of the fancier state management apps or other fancy routing libraries since your create-react-app project starts from scratch. They're all good but since I get to start from scratch and I build with my chosen libraries and learn how they work since I have to do it myself.

8. You Still Get Decent Hot Module Reloading

I have never been comfortable with react-hot-loader. Even after I tried the version 3 branch there were lots of times where I had to pause to think if I have to refresh the page or not.

By default, when you start a create-react-app project, it has a websocket thing connected to the server that notices when you edit source files and when doing so it refreshes the page you're on. That might feel brutish compared to the magic of proper hot module reloading. But for a guy who prefers console.log over debugger breakpoints this feels more than good enough to me.

In fact, if you add this to then bottom of your src/index.js now, when you edit a file, it won't refresh the page. Just reload the app:

if (module.hot) {
  module.hot.accept()
}

It will reload the state but the web console log doesn't disappear and a full browser refresh is usually slower.

9. Running Tests Included

I'll be honest and admit that I don't write tests. Not for side projects. Reason being that I'm almost always a single developer plus the app is most likely more a proof of concept than something supposed to stand the test of time.

But usually writing tests in JavaScript projects is scary. Not because it's hard but because it's tricky to get started. Which libraries should I use? Usually when you have a full suite up and running you realize that you depend on so many different libraries and once it works you cry a little when you read on Hacker News about some new fancy suite runner that literally has bells and whistles. create-react-app builds on jest but the documentation carefully takes you through the steps to start with simple unit tests to start rendering components, code coverage and continuous CI.

10. Dan Abramov

Dan is a powerhouse in the React community. Not just because he wrote Hot Reloading, redux and most of create-react-app, but because he's so incredibly nice.

I follow him on Twitter and his humble persona (aka #juniordevforlife) and positive attitude makes me feel close to him. And he oozes both-feet-on-the-ground-ism when it comes to the crazy world of JavaScript framework/library frenzy we're going through.

The fact that he built most of create-react-app, and that he encourages its uptake, makes me feel like I'm about to climb up on the shoulder of a giant.