Having written several React-based applications, it feels nowadays quite boring whenever I want to start a new React-based project. I need to set up webpack, webpack-dev-server, Babel (with several presets and plugins), Karma, React, several loaders for JSON, CSS, image files and font files — and integrate all these stuff together.

An alternative would be to use a boilerplate, but many boilerplates have a lot of stuff I don’t need (e.g. Router or Redux or server-side rendering) and lacking the things I need (e.g. CSS loaders and unit-testing). Not to mention that different projects have different configuration needs.

Also, things change really fast these days, and a boilerplate gets out of date pretty quickly. Once you created an app with the boilerplate, it is on you to keep your dependencies up-to-date. I’ve been upgrading dependencies for several different projects now and it’s a lot of grunt work.

But these days I tend to use nwb. Here’s how: