flash-generate v2.0.3

Flash Generate (NPM package)

Find the package here - flash-generate NPM package

Introduction

Create-React-App is a great way to get started with React applications without having to worry about webpack, babel, and other build dependencies, but getting started with it takes a lot of time!

With our lives moving fast, slow installation of dependencies & a relatively slow build time (for both production and development environment) was really a turn-off for me. I wanted to be able to produce React templates quickly. So, I made a beginner-friendly react template generator called Flash. Flash covers all the major things required in a React application along with optimized build (production and development) times and efficient debugging using source maps.

Any beginner can get started with the React templates in a very short time!

Disadvantages of CRA (Create-React-App)

Read more about the disadvantages of Create-React-App and the need to create Flash from here

Advantages of Flash-Generate

• It's Fast! - Don't believe me? Give it a try!

• No Abstraction - Everything's in front of you. Want to extend the application? Sure, go ahead! Want to change the port? Why not? Want to further optimize production build? Do it!

• Yarn over NPM - Flash makes use of Yarn to install dependencies! YARN is almost twice as fast as NPM because it parallelizes operations to maximize resource utilization so install times are much faster. The great part is that YARN is caching everything. It means highly-optimized build times the second time use Flash.

• Everything that a basic React application needs - Worried about having to include support for favicon, manifest.json, file-loaders in Webpack configuration for the production builds? I have got you covered! You get most of the things that a CRA gives you at a relatively faster pace!

• Work with the latest version of React! - I have made use of plugin-transform-react-jsx plugin over @babel/preset-react to make sure that the user is able to make use of latest feature of React.

Requirements

Check the requirements here

Installation

It is a CLI tool and hence needs to be gloablly installed on your computer. To install, use the following commands -

npm install -g flash-generate

or

yarn global add flash-generate

Usage

Here comes the most important part! Since this is the first version of Flash, the command to generate a basic React application is fairly simple -

flash-generate my-app --template=<TEMPLATE_NAME>

TEMPLATE_NAME is used to specify which template you want to generate. Here is a list of all the valid template names-

1. react-js: Generates a JavaScript-based React template.
2. react-router-js: Generates a JavaScript-based React template with a pre-installed react-router.`

The above command will create a directory called my-app inside the current folder with this project directory structure Inside that directory, it will generate the initial project structure and install the transitive dependencies.

No configuration or complicated folder structures, only the files you need to build your app. Once the installation is done, you can open your project folder:

cd my-app

Inside the newly created project, you can run some built-in commands:

yarn start

Runs the app in development mode. Open http://localhost:3000 to view it in the browser.

The page will automatically reload if you make changes to the code. You will see the build errors and lint warnings in the console.

npm run build or yarn build

Builds the app for production to the build folder. It correctly bundles React in production mode and optimizes the build for the best performance.

The build is minified and the filenames include the hashes.

Your app is ready to be deployed.

License

Flash is open source software licensed as MIT.

What's next?

I am caught with my end semester examinations, brb and will add more templates. I'll also bundle Typescript react applications with webpack. Alongside this, I also plan to add SCSS support.