A confused developer trying to configure create-react-app

If you’re working with React, you’re probably familiar with the create-react-app tool by now. If you’re not: it’s an official command line interface for building React applications with no build configuration.

With no build configuration.

With no build configuration…

With no build configuration!? But we need that! Kind of …

Now wait! Don’t jump on me with the “but it’s just supposed to be a simple tool, it doesn’t need any additional configuration!” argument!

👆 I posted a sneak peek of create-react-app + decorators on Twitter, and it looks like people are interested in it. But “decorators” is only one of the additional features we might need so we can switch to create-react-app for generating and building apps.

Many developers (including me) want to use create-react-app as their main dev setup for React apps but they can’t because they’re missing one or two features.

Someone needs just SASS.

SASS. Someone swears that if create-react-app had CSS modules, he would ditch his current setup instantly.

that if create-react-app had CSS modules, he would ditch his current setup instantly. Someone (me) just wanted decorator support because I’m using MobX in my projects. I know that MobX can be used without decorators, and i know they’re an experimental feature, but the code just looks cleaner and more readable with them.

The create-react-app team clearly stated that it doesn’t plan to add support for any experimental Babel features, or for custom webpack/babel configs. It totally makes sense, and after a few days of exploring the codebase, i completely understand them and support them even more in their decision.

*whispers silently* but devs still want some config options…

So what they do right now to customize their setup is:

They either eject their app and modify webpack/babel manually (opting to lose future create-react-app and react-scripts support in the feature)

Fork react-scripts and add support for just the X feature they need

feature they need Use another tool and complain that create-react-app is nice but doesn’t suit their needs

What i wanted to do is to write something that’s a little more flexible, allow different, but simple configurations, be always up to date with the original react-scripts, and (hopefully) satisfy everybody.