// the find
react/create-react-app
Set up a modern web app by running one command.
Create React App was the standard zero-config React scaffolding tool from 2017-2021, wrapping webpack, Babel, ESLint, and Jest into a single dependency. It is officially deprecated — the React team has moved on to framework-first recommendations like Next.js. This is a historical artifact, not a tool to adopt today.
- The 'one dependency' model (react-scripts) was genuinely clever — upgrading build tooling across thousands of projects was a single version bump, which solved a real pain point at the time.
- The eject escape hatch was a reasonable design: you got the full webpack config dumped into your project rather than being trapped behind an abstraction with no exit.
- The error overlay (react-error-overlay) with source-mapped stack frames clicking directly into your editor was ahead of its time and influenced how dev servers handle runtime errors today.
- Officially deprecated and in 'long-term stasis' per the README itself. The last meaningful push was 2025-02-15 but that's maintenance, not development. Do not start new projects here.
- Webpack 5 under the hood means cold start times that Vite-based tools (Vite, Rspack) beat by 10-50x on medium-sized projects. No ESM dev server, no HMR via native modules.
- Ejecting — the escape valve for any real customization — leaves you owning a 400-line webpack config that was never designed to be read by humans, with no path back.
- No SSR, no file-based routing, no server components. If you need any of those (and most production apps eventually do), you're migrating anyway, so you might as well start with Next.js or Remix.