Migrating from Create React App to Vite

Article: Migrating from Create React App to Vite

2024-07-06 Divider #Programming

This post is meant to document my process, thoughts and tips on the migration of my ReCalendar personal project from Create React App to Vite. It’s not meant to be an exhaustive guide. I wanted primarily to document the more interesting (and often frustrating) challenges of such a migration. So that others might benefit from them when scouring random pages on the web, searching for an explanation or solution to a cryptic error message.

The Challenges:

Migrating can be a real trip! Sometimes things just don't work out of the box, ya know? Like when you try to use a cool new feature and it breaks everything else. That's what happened when I tried to switch from CRA to Vite. It was a bit of a learning curve, but totally worth it in the end for the speed!

One of the main hurdles was getting the aliases to work correctly. Vite uses a different configuration system, so I had to learn how to set that up. Then there were some dependency issues that popped up, but a quick search on Google and some brave experimentation usually did the trick.

Pro Tip: Always back up your code before a big migration! And don't be afraid to dive into the documentation. It might seem intimidating at first, but it's your best friend when things go sideways.

Why Vite is Totally Awesome:

Seriously, Vite is SO fast. The dev server starts up in a snap, and hot module replacement (HMR) is like magic. Your code updates instantly without a page refresh. It's a game-changer for productivity.

Here's a little snippet of what the Vite config might look like (this is just an example, not the actual code!):

import { defineConfig } from 'vite'
import react from '@vitejs/plugin-react'

// https://vitejs.dev/config/
export default defineConfig({
  plugins: [react()],
  resolve: {
    alias: {
      '@': '/src',
    },
  },
})