- A toolkit, not a boilerplate.
- Uses Webpack 4, Babel 7 and Karma 5.
- Provides tooling for React apps and components, Preact apps, Inferno apps, and vanilla JS web apps and npm modules.
- Use modern JavaScript features and JSX.
- Use proposed JavaScript features now.
- Import CSS (and font resources) and images to be managed by Webpack.
- Autoprefixed CSS, so you don't need to write browser prefixes; you can also configure your own PostCSS plugins.
- Plugin modules which add support for the Sass, Less and Stylus stylesheet languages.
Development / DX:
- Quick development commands for React, Preact and Inferno which reduce the time from idea to running code.
- Development server with Hot Module Replacement, and syntax error and React
render()
error overlays. - User-friendly reporting of build status and errors in the CLI.
- Prompts to continue with a different port if the intended dev server port is not available.
- Express middleware for serving the same development Webpack build from your own server.
- Experimental: Automatically install dependencies from npm without restarting your development server by using an
--auto-install
flag. - Experimental: Write destructured ES module
import
s which transpile to cherry-picked imports for specific modules to keep your bundle size down.
Testing:
- Run unit tests with Karma in headless Chrome, using Mocha and Expect, without any configuration.
- Flexible defaults allow tests to be organised using a number of naming schemes, with tests in a separate directory, co-located with the code, or both.
- Code coverage reporting.
- Project skeletons ready to run tests on Travis CI and post code coverage results to Coveralls/codecov.io.
- Convenient to configure your preferred testing framework and other browsers instead of the defaults, with bundled support for launching tests in Chrome.
Production:
- Optimised Webpack build prepares JS, CSS and images for production, with deterministic filename hashes for long-term caching, and sourcemaps for debugging.
- Production optimisations for React apps: hoisting static elements and removing
propTypes
- Automatic creation of a separate vendor bundle.
- Flags to try a build which replaces React with Preact or Inferno via a compatibility layer, for a much smaller payload.
Publishing:
- Builds components and modules for publishing to npm with ES5 (including CommonJS export interop), ES modules and UMD builds.
- Project skeletons include a package.json config
files
whitelist to avoid bloating your published package. - React component skeleton includes a demo app ready to develop and build using the same React app development setup.
- React component
propTypes
are automatically wrapped with an environment check, for elimination from production builds.
Configuration:
- Use a single configuration file to customise Babel, Webpack, Karma and npm builds if you need to.
- Declarative config for Webpack rules and plugin settings makes then easy to tweak.
- Convenience configuration for commonly-used features like Webpack aliases and expression replacements.
- Compatibility configuration for libraries which commonly cause Webpack issues, e.g. for bundling Moment.js with only specified locales.