atrolov / typescript-react-less-starter

Starter repo catered to my liking for front end applications

webpack-typescript-react-less-starter

My skeleton framework for starting a front end application.

Stack

• Yarn - Dependency management
• TypeScript - Language
• TSLint - Linter for code style
• LESS - Styles
• Webpack - Preprocessor and development server

Yarn

An alternative-to-NPM dependency management tool from Facebook. Uses a yarn.lock file (autogenerated but committed as code) to store exact versions of dependent libraries. Preferred over NPM because (1) it guarantees that an install in one system will work exactly the same on a different one, and (2) it is much, much faster than NPM.

TypeScript

A statically typed superset of JavaScript that compiles to JavaScript. Preferred over vanilla JavaScript because (1) it actually makes large front end projects manageable (2) is super easy to refactor (3) if I have to use a preprocessor (see: babel) anyways to use new JavaScript features, I'd rather use one that's statically typed.

TSLint

Used for consistency in coding formatting and style. Should consider using Prettier.

LESS

Haven't used SASS et al. and is the most comfortable style preprocessing language for me. Haven't felt the need to change.

Webpack

Used for

• Compiling TypeScript/LESS and linting while developing
• Development server (webpack-dev-server), which is needed if I want to make API requests to servers that require SSL.

To Run

Install dependencies with Yarn.

yarn

Run the webpack server.

npm start