Migrating from Create React App (CRA) to Vite (2023)

FAQs

What is the difference between Vite and CRA? ›

Unlike CRA, Vite does not build your entire application before serving, instead, it builds the application on demand. It also leverages the power of native ES modules, esbuild, and Rollup to improve development and build time. Let's take a look in detail at what can make CRA slow.

Vite and CRA are not as different as you might think. At their core, they pretty much do the same thing, which is to serve a local development server and bundle codes for production. The major difference you'll notice is how code is served in development and which modules are supported.

NextJS is probably the most popular toolchain besides CRA. It comes with its own routing and styling solutions (styling can be tricky when working with SSR). Vercel, the maintainer of NextJS, is also responsible for other packages that can be used in any React project (e.g., swr).

Vite is a build tool similar to Webpack. It can be used for React, Preact, Svelte, Vue, Vanilla JS, and LitElements. Vite is 100 times faster than Webpack and bundles your code with Rollup, pre-configured to output highly optimised static assets. Your browser does not support the audio element.

Vite gives you same fast start, but you don't have this blackboxed config that is too scary to look at. This also means that if you need something additional, your config will grow with your app, and wouldn't try and solve problems before those problems will occur. Vite is also very fast and convenient to use.

Why it is better to avoid Create React App (CRA) CRA was created for beginners (according to Facebook) to learn React without understanding the underline configurations of Webpack. However, it is not created for production. Unfortunately, devs have been using it for all their projects.

Even if it's your first time using React, you shouldn't be using Create React App. Create React App is what almost every developer (including myself) learned to use first when learning the JavaScript library React and I think this has led to a couple of significant flaws.

Vite represents a quick, easy-to-use environment that doesn't require long builds to get started with a project. Although it's not a perfect solution for every project, it can speed up development quite a bit, especially in large projects where its ability to just hot-swap whole modules can really help.

What are the advantages of Vite? ›

Vite improves the dev server start time by first dividing the modules in an application into two categories: dependencies and source code. Dependencies are mostly plain JavaScript that do not change often during development.

While a bundler-based workflow like Webpack will have to process your entire JavaScript modules before a single browser request, Vite only processes your dependency modules before a single browser request. This is why Vite is able to process your development build faster than Webpack.

When it is time to deploy your app for production, simply run the vite build command. By default, it uses <root>/index. html as the build entry point, and produces an application bundle that is suitable to be served over a static hosting service.

More and more software companies insist to hire skilled React developers. Being a renowned and in-demand technology, it demands a certain level of expertise to offer the best development work. To accomplish certain sets of projects, companies are looking to hire ReactJS developers with exceptional skills.

Create React App enables you to include styles by importing the necessary CSS files. While building the application, every CSS file would be concatenated into one bundle. Subsequently, it will be adjoined to the build folder. Create React App supports CSS modules as well.

Plus you don't need Babel if you're using Vite so you can get rid of a tonne of dependencies and security vulnerability messages.

Vite provides a build command to create an optimized and production-ready build of our application. During the build, Vite also optimizes our static assets like images, etc.

Should I Use Next JS or CRA? Typically if you have an application that will only be used behind a login, CRA is a good choice. However, if you have an application for which SEO is important and fast page loads are critical, then Next JS is the right solution.

The core functionality of Vite is similar to webpack + webpack-dev-server with some new improvements and functionalities on developer experience, such as: Regardless of app size, you'll spend less time waiting for your app to start. HMR (Hot module Reloading) is an instant, irrespective of the size of the app.

Which is the best CMS for React? ›

Hygraph is one of the best choices for a "React CMS" because it based 100% on GraphQL and, as such, helps makes working with your structured content as simple as possible.

Create React App is open source software licensed as MIT. The Create React App logo is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.

Netflix also uses React, notably on their Gibbon platform, which is utilized for low-performance TV devices rather than the DOM used in web browsers. Significant reasons like notably start-up speed, runtime performance, and modularity made them choose React.

Netflix uses ModeJs with the assistance of React for image synthesis. In this article, we have also incorporated a React Netflix clone project with source code which is also available on Netflix clone react js Github. This article will also help you in checking out the Netflix clone project report.

The short answer is YES! As we can see from the benefits listed in this article, it is easy to see why React is still enjoying its popularity in 2022. It was voted the 2nd most popular web framework for developers, only falling behind Node. js (see above) 2022 in the reliable StackOverflow Developer Survey 2022.

According to the Stack Overflow Survey, React was the number one web framework used by software developers worldwide in 2021 but, according to the data provided by Statista, in 2022, this framework was overtaken by Node. js, with 47.12% of web developers using this framework against 42.62% of React users.

According to a Statista study, React JS is the most in-demand web framework in 2022, with 40.41% of software developers globally indicating they use it to develop web applications. This has led to an increase in React JS developers demand and, correspondingly, an increase in their salaries.

With Vite and code-splitting, your browser will only fetch JS files in small batches, resulting in much better performance. But Webpack isn't as far behind as one may think. Available since 5.20, Webpack can defer compilation of dynamically imported modules.

Many of the developers are in a dilemma to consider Vite as a framework or tool. So, let me clear the fog that Vite is a frontend dev tool, which supports any frontend framework, with supported templates for Vue, TezJS, React, Preact, Lit Element, Svelte, and vanilla JavaScript. However, Vite is not only Vue-specific.

What are alternatives to Vite? ›

Webpack, gulp, Grunt, Parcel, and rollup are the most popular alternatives and competitors to Vite.

Vite uses Rollup to perform a more aggressive dead-code elimination (tree shaking) than Webpack, which is why it takes longer to create a production build.

Vite is a build tool created by Evan You, the creator of Vue. It allows for faster development thanks to super fast Hot Module Reload (HMR), fast cold start times, and CSS + JSX + TypeScript support out of the box.

Vite can be extended using plugins, which are based on Rollup's well-designed plugin interface with a few extra Vite-specific options. This means that Vite users can rely on the mature ecosystem of Rollup plugins, while also being able to extend the dev server and SSR functionality as needed.

Vite improves the dev server start time by first dividing the modules in an application into two categories: dependencies and source code. Dependencies are mostly plain JavaScript that do not change often during development.

The CRA provides the information to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) in the U.S. and the IRS provides the CRA with information on accounts of Canadian residents held at U.S. financial institutions.

Vite. js allows developers to set up a development environment for frameworks like Vue, TezJS and React and even for Vanilla JavaScript app with a dev server. Moreover, it allows the development team to hot reload in just three commands. Vite supports Rollup.

A huge advantage of using Vite, as we already established, is blazing fast start-ups with instant hot module replacement. It's much faster than other CLIs, such as Create React App or Vue CLI, which use webpack under the hood. Out-of-the-box support for TypeScript.

The difference between the two boils down to speed. Webpack is building the project from source and continuing to do incremental builds as you are developing your project. Vite, on the other hand, is loading your actual code into the browser as needed.