React developer team recently removed create-react-app from the official documentation. This means it is no longer the default method of setting up a new project in React. According to this pull request on Github, create-react-app is finally gone.

The problem with CRA

For far too long,create-react-app or CRA has had problems with its performance. It is slow and bulky compared to the modern methods. The initial setup is quite bulky as there are a lot of dependencies to be installed. It also is outdated as the dependencies themselves suffer from warnings during installation. These problems have troubled developers for far too long. Since CRA was the officially supported way, beginners had a hard time solving these issues.

What are the alternatives?

There are various ways to setup a new React project. In fact, the official documentation now mentions frameworks like NEXT-JS, Remix etc for beginners. In this post however, we will look into using Vite to setup our React app in under a minute.

Why Vite?

Vite is one of the fastest ways to start a project in react. It has faster server start time. It has better compatibility with plugins. It supports TypeScript, has better dependency resolving features out of the box. React projects created from Vite are just 20% the size of that created by CRA. You can read more about Vite here

Creating a new React project using Vite

Let's create a new React project using Vite. Run the following in the folder where you want your new app.

npm create vite@latest

Name your project and select React from the type of project. Next select variant, here we are using JavaScript.

And it is done! Seriously, that's it. All of this takes less than a minute to setup.
You can now run the app using

cd <project-root>
npm i
npm run dev

Your app is up and running

Congratulations!🎉🎉