Difference between Webpack/Babel and react-scripts

Question

Recently i started working on web pack and react-scripts and i would like to know the advantages and disadvantages using them and how they are different from each other.

Answer 1

WebPack and react-scripts is slightly different things.

Webpack is used for compiling bundle for your web-application, which can be free-form and have some entry point. More then, webpack is used with babel-presets, which allows you to use modern ES6+ constructions in relative old browsers. Also, webpack is responsible for assembly dependent node_modules in one file, and maybe compress and optimise it. You can read more about webpack philosophy here: https://webpack.js.org/concepts/

React-scripts is just starter kit for launching some customized webpack-dev-server, which is configured to work with provided boilerplate for React playground. It's just demo purposes thing. Most modern web libraries has it's own starter kit, even server-side libraries too, e.g. https://github.com/reimagined/resolve/tree/master/packages/resolve-scripts and so on