Create-react-app: Any plans to do nightly releases in the near future?

[sbalay]

Is your proposal related to a problem?

Not really related to a problem. In the last couple of months I have found myself in a situation where I was really interested in testing something that was merged in the master branch, but not yet released. Happened to me now with the experimental support for fast refresh, also happened in the past with the support for TS3.7 and the ability to change webpack dev server host/port

Describe the solution you'd like

Some other libs in the community do alpha/beta or nightly releases to allow developers to play with the latest things merged to master. I created this issue after discussing this with @mrmckeb in spectrum

Describe alternatives you've considered

An easy alternative is to clone create-react-app and link react-scripts locally... but this process does not really scale when working with several developers in the same repo and all of them have to do the same on their own.

Other alternative was to try to build react-scrips locally and publish it github packages, then all my colleagues could just install that dependency from that registry instead... but being honest I couldn't make that work.
The same for trying to publish react-scripts to npm registry changing the name to something like @sbalay/react-scripts

Additional context

I think that I'm not the only one interested in this, several people in the community follow the excellent work that you do in this repo day to day and are eager to test things and help out 🙂

[avindra]

If anyone else is wondering when we are going to get Fast Refresh support, it looks like it's tied up in the 4.0 milestone:

https://github.com/facebook/create-react-app/milestone/69

[avindra]

If anyone wants to try it locally, you can generate a patch from the PR using:

https://github.com/facebook/create-react-app/pull/8582.patch

and then remove all the documentation related portions of the patch, and replace /packages/ with /node_modules/. Then, you can have the patch applied as part of your postinstall script.

I've been waiting for proper hot reloading in create-react-app for a long time now, so I decided to go with this approach until 4.x releases.

I inherted a project that uses create-react-app and the lack of hot reloading is utterly unacceptable for at-scale development. I really hope this releases soon... the entire ecosystem would benefit greatly from having this working out of the box without having to "patch" or "rewire" their dependencies. For the past 2 years of building a large project, I've been crashing the browser tab and fully reloading the page.... a major regression from just using webpack directly.

[CodingDive]

Nightly releases would be great also for things like updating dependencies.

Developer dependencies such as typescript-eslint/eslint-plugin can cause issues all the time because our projects use them and react-scripts ships their own, often incompatible or outdated version.