Create-react-app: Full Windows support

[gaearon]

I believe @insin has access to Windows—would be great if we could keep track of things that are still broken/missing there. Let’s close this issue when the support is complete.

@insin Can I ask you to write up a checklist if there’s more than a few broken things so we keep track of them?

TODO:

• [x] fix eject
• [x] fix fs-events crash on install
• [x] fix fs-events crash on eject
• [x] bundle-deps shouldn't be in dependencies

[insin]

Sure, I'll try all the commands & scripts from scratch when I get some time and report back.

I'm your worst case user - using npm2 on Windows, running on the cheapest Lenovo laptop Amazon UK had 5 months ago, with a crap CPU and an HDD :smile_cat:

Anything which uses vanilla Babel 6 presets is pretty miserable to install on npm2 with this setup due to the duplicated dependencies for each plugin.

[gaearon]

Yeah.. I wonder if we can do something crazy like put all non-binary deps in a tarball or something.

[gaearon]

Until the packages are public, you can do this to test the full flow:

npm i -g counter-redux@qwertyuiop
create-react-app whatever --scripts-version react-elmish-example@bundled

[lacker]

Tried it with npm 2.15.8 (currently the default suggested windows install flow). Tiny problem: the unicode hourglass shows up as a square in powershell. Larger problem: fsevents apparently depends on having python installed. (I don't normally use this as a dev machine.) I'll see if there's a workaround. Here's the error for the record.

[gaearon]

Interesting. fsevents is optional, on OS X it gets installed for faster rebuilds but webpack should work without it. Can you also try

create-react-app whatever --scripts-version react-elmish-example@no-bundle

to see if fsevents doesn't show up this way?

[lacker]

Ah I see fsevents is OS X only. With @no-bundle now both the create-react-app phase and the npm start are working for me. I'll poke around to see if I can break anything else.

[gaearon]

Eh, that’s not fun. Maybe I could exclude whatever depends on fsevents from the bundle but keep the rest bundled.

[lacker]

Another problem - when I eject and then run start, it can't find webpack any more. But when I manually run a npm install after that, it works fine. I suspect that whatever logic runs an npm install immediately after ejecting is not working on Windows.

[lacker]

A little nitpick: the message for npm run build is incorrect on Windows.

You can now serve it with any static server:
  cd build
  python -m SimpleHTTPServer 9000
  open http://localhost:9000

because open isn't a windows thing. AFAICT there is no Windows command line equivalent so unless someone has a good idea maybe just leave this message as is.

[gaearon]

Yeah, I was hoping that maybe people would just read it as a word if they know there is no such command. Open to better ideas (can check platform?)

[lacker]

OK I can't find any more ways to break it. So just two big things, fsevents in the bundle and the eject-then-start problem. Unrelated: @gaearon would you mind briefly checking FB messenger? I just wanted to ask you a quick question there. :P

[insin]

For the build message, you could check for process.platform being 'win32' and use start instead of open.

Windows doesn't ship with a Python installation, though - a handy alternative would be to recommend npm install -g http-server and running hs.

[gaearon]

955ea330df0339cadf337a72bafbf806163dfd8c

[insin]

Do you have an AppVeyor account to run CI on Windows?

Better to have things checked automatically on all platforms, but new tests would need to be written.

[gaearon]

I think we’re good. I’ll double check now.

[gaearon]

Okay, final prerelease:

npm i -g counter-redux@qwertyuiop
create-react-app my-app --scripts-version react-elmish-example@pretty-close

[rooseveltAI]

Also when installing, if it throws a "JSON" error and crashes, try running this command:

create-react-app appname --save

or create-react-app appname --save-exact and then try again.

if it persists you can try using a newer version of node.