I love create-react-app too, but for a slightly different reason: They have an excellent, super-comprehensive README that covers practically everything you'd e

I love create-react-app too, but for a slightly different reason: They have an excellent, super-comprehensive README that covers practically everything you'd ever need to know about state-of-the-art Frontend JS tooling: https://github.com/facebookincubator/create-react-app/blob/master/packages/react-scripts/template/README.md https://github.com/facebookincubator/create-react-app/blob/m... create-react-app itself is great for quick prototyping, but for non-trivial apps, chances are, eventually some esoteric production concern will force you to "eject". At that point, the sheer volume of configuration you'll be left with will be rather overwhelming if you've never dealt with the underlying technologies before, and modifying/extending it can become rather intimidating. My recommendation is to start your first few projects with create-react-app, to get a feel for what a modern JS dev experience feels like, and then once you find the need to eject, instead of actually ejecting, copy your code over to a new project starting with just a bare minimum Webpack + Babel config, like the one in react-hot-loader-minimal-boilerplate (https://github.com/wkwiatek/react-hot-loader-minimal-boilerplate/blob/master/webpack.config.js https://github.com/wkwiatek/react-hot-loader-minimal-boilerp...) and refer to the ejected configs of the create-react-app version of your app and the create-react-app README to port over pieces of tooling that you feel are sorely missing from your create-react-app days, one by one. This way, you'll be left with a much simpler and leaner tooling pipeline that you fully understand and one that you'll be able to extend and maintain much more easily. I usually refer to the react-hot-loader-minimal-boilerplate config as a baseline simply because I consider es-next transpilation and hot-reloading essential parts of the modern Frontend dev experience. If you don't, you can totally start with something even more barebones.