NINikhilVerma·Aug 24, 2016
IMO a much better approach is JSCodeShift, which works based on the AST: https://github.com/facebook/jscodeshift
In Undebt: How We Refactored 3M Lines of Codemeta
jscodeshift
JavaScript2016–2024
meta / jscodeshift
jscodeshift
A JavaScript codemod toolkit.
15Distinct people
17Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
10KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
A JavaScript codemod toolkit.
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use was verified in the last source check.
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
- benjamn/recast · linked in 2 of the same discussions
- estree/estree · 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, 2:17:07 AM 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 year17 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2016-05-18 14:31:58 UTC to 2024-06-16 03:13:38 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2016 | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 4 | 1 | 3 |
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 4 | 0 | 4 |
| 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 | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 1 | 2 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
What Hacker News says
4 sourcesI think everybody is; it looks like whatever CMS they're using eats newlines out of content pasted into <pre>s, because there aren't any in the source.
Maybe it's a cavil, but I'm not overjoyed at the thought of doing global search and destroy on my codebases with a tool I heard about on a website that messes up something that basic.
On the other hand, apparently jscodeshift itself comes from Facebook [1], and they tend to do good work (on a technical level, at least); perhaps it'd be worthwhile to change the HN link to point to that repo, not least because the code samples aren't munged to unintelligibility there.
[1] https://github.com/facebook/jscodeshift
In Write Code to Rewrite Your Code: jscodeshiftJSCodeShift – write reusable, shareable codemods
2 points · Open discussionUpdating doesn't work with boilerplates at all, but a CLI tool wouldn't really fix that — what you'd really want is a codeshift[1] for each new version, which we're looking into right now! (you probably also don't need to update them at all)
We've added tons of removal guides for each major feature, so people can take the parts they want from react-boilerplate and discard the ones they don't want!
I see it more as a reference implementation that gets many small details right, a thing you clone and the cut to your liking to keep all those small details intact.
Does that make sense?
[1]: https://github.com/facebook/jscodeshift
In React-Boilerplate v3: The “JS Fatigue Antivenin” Edition