INinsin·Jun 7, 2016Submission
Show HN: Nwb – quick React development and configurable project dev tooling
6 points · Open discussioninsin
nwb
JavaScript2015–2020
insin / nwb · Archived
nwb
A toolkit for React, Preact, Inferno & vanilla JS apps, React libraries and other npm modules for the web, with no configuration (until you need it)
10Distinct people
14Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
5.5KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
A toolkit for React, Preact, Inferno & vanilla JS apps, React libraries and other npm modules for the web, with no configuration (until you need it)
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use has been verified yet.
What people are saying
No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.
No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.
Also in these discussions
- react/create-react-app · linked in 2 of the same discussions
Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 5:05:26 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year14 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2015-12-03 11:29:47 UTC to 2020-05-14 12:45:34 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2015 | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| 2016 | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 6 | 2 | 4 |
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 4 | 3 | 1 |
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
What Hacker News says
6 sources> So many things to keep in mind, so many dependencies, so very many points of failure. If just one of these libraries is abandoned, or has a breaking change, your entire development environment is dead. Is this the current state of frontend web dev, or are these guys just overdoing it for the sake of the tutorial?
This tutorial is trying to guide you over the initial hump with the tooling by letting you hit the issues you'd hit if you were learning it on your own (like dependencies which need tweaks to your Webpack config to work properly like sinon, enzyme, moment...).
They _could_ have handed you a completely pre-baked config and got to Hello World in step 2, but you wouldn't have learnt anything about the tooling.
In terms of a development library you depend on being abandoned or broken, I've extracted my React development environment
Read the rest
out into a separate npm package [1] and it's still using Babel 5, auto-prefixer loader (which is deprecated in favour of using PostCSS directly) and is working around every version of babel-runtime v5 after 5.8.29 containing a broken version of an important module. By pinning your dependencies, you can keep using old or deprecated versions of things until you're ready to upgrade, and by managing development tools in an external module you can upgrade your projects when you're good and ready by bumping a version number.
If you do that, starting a React project (or any other project which gets tool-heavy for apps of any size) can be a 1-step proceess you can have an understanding of the tooling, and you have a way to keep it manageable over time.
[1] https://github.com/insin/nwb#nwb
I use this to generate new project skeletons and handle all the dev/test/build tooling:
https://github.com/insin/nwb
I just use GitHub pages for static project hosting. Surge, or something similar, would probably be more convenient.
In Ask HN: What's your workflow for simple side projects?It has focus on great production features without diving into config until you are ready.
For something more approachable but less powerful check out https://github.com/insin/nwb.
In React Makes You Sad?CLI tool for React apps and components and plain JavaScript apps and npm modules
2 points · Open discussionActually a few weeks ago there was a big movement in the React community about that. The problem is that the JS community is too big and people use different build systems and tests frameworks, let alone coding styles or project/files layout.
I think only Ember has been able to have a strong set of conventions, mostly thanks to ember-cli[1]. I consider it the Rails of JS.
That said, I am looking into nwb[2]. Looks fine for personal projects.
[1] http://ember-cli.com
[2] https://github.com/insin/nwb
In Why React/Redux is inferior as a paradigm