A Better Starting Point

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Setting up a project has previously been quite cumbersome including gluing libraries to work together. This talk will dive into revolutionizing project setup using Create T3 App and the flexibility of modular selections to get you started in minutes.

This talk has been presented at React Summit 2024, check out the latest edition of this React Conference.

FAQ

CreateNextApp is a tool that helps set up a basic Next.js project with just a home page and a Hello API endpoint. It aims to get you started quickly with the Next.js framework.

CreateNextApp is basic and does not include additional libraries or tools needed for a full stack application, such as databases, authentication, or styling solutions. Developers need to integrate these parts themselves.

CreateT3App is an enhanced version of CreateNextApp that includes additional libraries like TypeScript, Tailwind, TRPC, NextAuth, and Prisma. It offers a more comprehensive setup for full stack applications.

The main issue is that CreateNextApp provides too little functionality, requiring developers to integrate additional libraries themselves. Early versions of CreateT3App included too many preset packages, which could overwhelm developers or provide more than they needed.

The new version of CreateT3App is modular, allowing developers to choose which libraries and technologies they want to include. This customization ensures they get exactly what they need without unnecessary extras.

T3env is a package included by default in CreateT3App. It helps manage environment variables, which are crucial for configuring third-party services and databases. It ensures that missing configurations are caught at build time, preventing runtime errors.

T3 Turbo is a monorepo version of CreateT3App. It separates core functionalities into individual packages, allowing them to be used in multiple projects. This is useful for sharing logic between different platforms like web and mobile applications.

The speaker's name is Julius, a software engineering student from Sweden who works at PingLabs. He contributes to UploadThing and maintains open source libraries.

CreateT3App includes TypeScript, Tailwind, TRPC, NextAuth, Prisma, and T3env by default.

TypeScript provides static analysis, helping developers identify issues such as misspellings or incorrect value types in functions. This adds a layer of reliability and maintainability to the code.

Julius Marminge
Julius Marminge
7 min
18 Jun, 2024

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Video Summary and Transcription

In this talk, the speaker introduces CreateNextApp and CreateT3App as tools for quickly setting up Next.js projects. CreateT3App has a modular CLI that allows users to select specific technologies. The speaker also discusses E3env, which ensures control of environment variables, and T3 Turbo, a monorepo version of CreateT3App that offers flexibility for installation and deployment.
Available in Español: Un Mejor Punto de Partida

1. Introduction to CreateNextApp and CreateT3App

Short description:

In this talk, I will show you how to set up your next project quickly. CreateNextApp and CreateT3App are tools for scaffolding Next.js projects. CreateNextApp provides a basic JavaScript project, while CreateT3App includes TypeScript, Tailwind, TRPC, NextAuth, and Prisma. However, CreateT3App suffers from the limitation of using a single template. To address this, we have developed a fully modular CLI that allows you to choose the specific technologies you need. Each technology can be selected independently from one another.

Hello, everybody, and welcome to this talk where I'm going to show you how to set up your next project in just a few seconds. My name is Julius, and I'm a software engineering student from Sweden. I also work at PingLabs, where we build UploadThing, and I help maintain and contribute to some open source libraries that we're going to check out today.

Before we start off with our next project, let's check out the past and see how init tools worked before. This is CreateNextApp version 12, which was released in June 2022, I think. That was almost two years ago now. And it was very basic. It threw out the JavaScript project with just a home page and a Hello API endpoint. This is all you need to get started with Next.js, and it's the intention of CreateNextApp to just get you set up with just Next.js. But if you're building a full stack application, you're going to need more libraries. You're going to need a database, you're going to need authentication, you're going to need some way to style your application. There's a lot of parts that goes into making a full stack application. And if you're starting off of Next.app, you're left with integrating all of those parts yourself.

CreateT3App is a bit more batteries included version of CreateNextApp, where it still scaffolds a Next.js project for you, but it does it with a few libraries built on top of it. First off, we have TypeScript, because we think that you shouldn't use JavaScript to build full stack applications. TypeScript provides a lot of value where you can have static analysis and just be told where you're either just misspelling something or you're passing the wrong type of values to a function. We're also including Tailwind, TRPC, later also NextAuth and Prisma. So at that point, you have everything you needed to get started with your next full stack application. But I think that this still suffers from a major problem, and that it just throws out a single template.

CreateT3App from the beginning was still just a template from GitHub that the CLI was cloning down. And you weren't given the option to pick if you wanted to use TRPC, Tailwind, Prisma, NextAuth, any of these packages. And I think it's an issue on both ends here where if you're using CreateNextApp and not getting anything, you're left as a developer to integrate different packages together. And that can be cumbersome if you do this a lot. And it would be great if a tool can automate this process for you. But at the same time, if you include too many packages and too much boilerplate code, a developer might be either overwhelmed or they just get way more than they actually need. Maybe some project doesn't need NextAuth, or maybe some project doesn't need Tailwind, either because they don't need it entirely, or they want to try out a different package to solve that problem. And that's why we needed something a bit more modular than just a CLI that takes a template from GitHub and clones it down to your local machine. The solution was in the following versions of CreateT3App, where we have built a fully modular CLI that lets you bring exactly what you need and leave out the parts that you don't. Each technology in this CLI can be selected independently from one another. So as you can see right here, we can select each option or we can just skip that and move on to the next step.

1. Introduction to CreateT3App

Short description:

In this talk, I will show you how to set up your next project in just a few seconds using CreateT3App. It is a more modular CLI that allows you to select the specific technologies you need for your full stack application. You can choose TypeScript, Tailwind, TRPC, NextAuth, Prisma, and more. This approach solves the problem of either getting nothing or being overwhelmed with too much boilerplate code. With CreateT3App, you can bring exactly what you need and leave out the parts you don't.

Hello, everybody, and welcome to this talk where I'm going to show you how to set up your next project in just a few seconds. My name is Julius, and I'm a software engineering student from Sweden. I also work at PingLabs, where we build UploadThing, and I help maintain and contribute to some open source libraries that we're going to check out today.

Before we start off with our next project, let's check out the past and see how init tools worked before. This is CreateNextApp version 12, which was released in June 2022, I think. That was almost two years ago now. And it was very basic. It threw out the JavaScript project with just a home page and a Hello API endpoint. This is all you need to get started with Next.js, and it's the intention of CreateNextApp to just get you set up with just Next.js. But if you're building a full stack application, you're going to need more libraries. You're going to need a database, you're going to need authentication, you're going to need some way to style your application. There's a lot of parts that goes into making a full stack application. And if you're starting off of Next.app, you're left with integrating all of those parts yourself.

CreateT3App is a bit more batteries included version of CreateNextApp, where it still scaffolds a Next.js project for you, but it does it with a few libraries built on top of it. First off, we have TypeScript, because we think that you shouldn't use JavaScript to build full stack applications. TypeScript provides a lot of value where you can have static analysis and just be told where you're either just misspelling something or you're passing the wrong type of values to a function. We're also including Tailwind, TRPC, later also NextAuth and Prisma. So at that point, you have everything you needed to get started with your next full stack application.

But I think that this still suffers from a major problem, and that it just throws out a single template. So CreateT3App from the beginning was still just a template from GitHub that the CLI was cloning down. And you weren't given the option to pick if you wanted to use TRPC, Tailwind, Prisma, NextAuth, any of these packages. And I think it's an issue on both ends here where if you're using CreateNextApp and not getting anything, you're left as a developer to integrate different packages together. And that can be cumbersome if you do this a lot. And it would be great if a tool can automate this process for you. But at the same time, if you include too many packages and too much boilerplate code, a developer might be either overwhelmed or they just get way more than they actually need. Maybe some project doesn't need NextAuth, or maybe some project doesn't need Tailwind, either because they don't need it entirely, or they want to try out a different package to solve that problem. And that's why we needed something a bit more modular than just a CLI that takes a template from GitHub and clones it down to your local machine. The solution was in the following versions of CreateT3App, where we have built a fully modular CLI that lets you bring exactly what you need and leave out the parts that you don't. Each technology in this CLI can be selected independently from one another. So as you can see right here, we can select each option or we can just skip that and move on to the next step.

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