🚨 Sunset of Create-React-App: A New Era for React Developers Begins

It's an emotional moment for all React developers and the entire React community — React has officially deprecated create-react-app (CRA) for new applications.

If you try to use create-react-app for your new projects now, you'll likely encounter an error.

According to the official React documentation and GitHub repositories, create-react-app is no longer recommended.

❓ Why Did React Deprecate Create-React-App?

create-react-app (CRA) played a major role in the React ecosystem for many years. With a single command, developers could scaffold a fully working project with:

  • Hot Module Replacement (HMR)
  • Local development server
  • Babel and Webpack pre-configured

However, as the needs of modern web applications grew, CRA started to fall short in key areas like:

  • 🚀 Server-side rendering (SSR)
  • 🔐 Authentication
  • 📦 Code splitting
  • 🌐 Routing
  • 🔄 Data fetching

To achieve these features, developers often had to rely on third-party libraries, making CRA less relevant for production-ready applications.

So, to keep pace with the modern requirements, React has moved on from CRA and is encouraging developers to adopt frameworks or build tools that are better suited for complex apps.

🔄 What's Next?

React now recommends two paths for new projects or for migrating existing ones:

🧭 Option 1: Migrate to a Framework

React recommends using full-featured frameworks that support SSR and Single Page Applications (SPA) out of the box.

Here are the top suggestions:

  1. Next.js – The most popular React framework with built-in SSR, routing, image optimization, and more.
  2. React Router Framework – Focused on routing, now expanding to support more features.
  3. Expo (for React Native) – A powerful toolset for building cross-platform mobile apps using React.

🛠️ Option 2: Migrate to a Build Tool

If you want more control and prefer custom setups, React recommends these modern build tools:

  1. Vite – Lightning-fast development server with support for hot module replacement and fast builds.
  2. Parcel – Zero-config bundler with out-of-the-box support for many features.
  3. Rsbuild – A newer bundler optimized for performance and customization.

🚚 How to Migrate Your Existing CRA App?

You can migrate by:

  • Choosing a framework like Next.js
  • Or setting up your app manually with Vite, Parcel, or Rsbuild
  • Gradually moving over features like routing, state management, and build scripts

🎉 Conclusion

The deprecation of create-react-app marks the end of an era, but also the beginning of a more modern, flexible, and powerful React ecosystem.

React continues to evolve, and it's exciting to see where it's heading. Embrace the change, try out new tools, and build even better apps!

Happy Learning! 🚀