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Discussion on: Better ways to Create React App

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joelbonetr profile image
JoelBonetR 🥇 •

You can also use Parcel bundler which is quite convenient most of the time

npm init -y && npm i parcel -D && npm i react react-dom -s
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Didn't you tried it before?

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valeriavg profile image
Valeria •

Yes, I believe I did, though don't recall much. How does it fair in comparison to the tools from the article?

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joelbonetr profile image
JoelBonetR 🥇 • • Edited

Didn't check tbh, I used it once on a production project and most of the time on side projects due to this "zero config"; actually it has a couple of quirks that need to be understood though. At the point we choose parcel, the output was definitely lower in weight than webpack, but I didn't tested it against rollup.

The setup speed is quite good and it handles config and deps whenever it found them in the project.

Quick example. If your entry point look like that:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
  <head>
    <meta charset="UTF-8" />
    <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=edge" />
    <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0" />
    <title>Document</title>
  </head>
  <body>
    <div id="app"></div>
  </body>
</html>
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and you want to add a global scss, you can simply do:

<link rel="stylesheet" href="./styles/main.scss">
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and Parcel will install some scss-to-css parser as dependency, also optimize it with cssnano or any other optimizer and build the entire thing, replace the reference to the scss file in the html for a reference to the parsed, minified, optimized and hashed css version and serve it for you.

Isn't automation the absolute end target in our field? 😍😂

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valeriavg profile image
Valeria •

I tested parcel as you've suggested, here's what I've got:

npm i parcel --save-dev
npm WARN deprecated stable@0.1.8: Modern JS already guarantees Array#sort() is a stable sort, so this library is deprecated. See the compatibility table on MDN: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/Array/sort#browser_compatibility

added 166 packages, and audited 167 packages in 23s

72 packages are looking for funding
  run `npm fund` for details

found 0 vulnerabilities
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166 packages, twice that of vite, but also no vulnerabilities.

Takes a lot more space on the disc though:

du -hc -s  node_modules
204M    node_modules
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It seems to be quite slow, to be honest:

./node_modules/.bin/parcel public/index.html
Server running at http://localhost:1234
✨ Built in 976ms
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joelbonetr profile image
JoelBonetR 🥇 •

Thanks for the info! 😁

It's slower the first time always (or when you add new things that require new deps) as it needs to check your project thingies to install other dependencies, it should be faster in subsequent builds, also the top benefit is on config (or the lack of it)