Starter Pack Will Change How Developers Build Apps
By: Sunil Sandhu
Tags: Web Development, React, Software Development, Programming, JavaScript

Starter Pack Will Change How Developers Build Apps

Access all of your favourite CLI tools (plus lots more) with one command

What is Starter Pack?

Starter Pack unifies all the other CLI tools. Forget having to install/remember/google lots of different commands, access them all through Starter Pack!

This also means you don’t have to worry about always keeping the various CLI tools you use up to date because Starter Pack will take care of it for you. Keep Starter Pack up to date and all your other CLI tools will be as well!

Who is Starter Pack for?

Everyone! We have created a tool that is (hopefully) accessible to developers of all skill levels.

But what about competing standards? Doesn’t this just create another?

This is an understandable concern. So let’s explain why this isn’t something you will need to worry about.

Starter Pack is made up of many ‘Packs’. A Pack is simply a project. While some of the packs we offer have been created from scratch, most of them are interfaces on top of existing CLI tools.

One such example would be our Svelte Pack. This simply uses the same commands you would use to create a Svelte project with the Svelte CLI tool. The only difference here is that you don’t have to ever worry about downloading or explicitly making use of Svelte’s own CLI tool every time you want to make a new project. The same applies to React, Vue and Angular.

Rather than you having to download, install and remember the commands for their respective CLI tools, Starter Pack provides a single interface on top of all of them. And because it is just an interface (and not an implementation), whenever those individual CLI tools update any of their dependencies, you can be sure that Starter Pack will always be using the latest version.

Available Packs

Currently, Starter Pack offers the following:

Angular

React

React (Next.js)

React + Express

React + TypeScript

Svelte

Vue

Vue + TypeScript

Website

We have plans to add more in the future. In the meantime, reach out to us over Twitter if you have any Pack suggestions/requests.

Getting Started

There are two ways you can get started. The first is to install the Starter Pack on your device by running npm i -g @starter-pack/cli or by running npx @starter-pack/cli which will give you access to the latest version any time you execute that (providing you already have access to npx on your device).

If you’ve opted for the first option, once installed you should then be able to type @starter-pack/cli into the command line. This will start the CLI tool.

You will then be asked two questions:

What would you like to name your project? Which Starter Pack would you like to use?

Your answer to the first will become the name for your project. This will appear as the name in your package.json and will become the name for the folder of your project.

Your answer to the second question determines what type of pack you will have.

For example, if you decide to call your project ‘The Best App’ and choose to use Vue, Starter Pack will create a Vue project called ‘the-best-app’.

Bear in mind that the project will be created in the same directory as wherever you have executed the command.

So the CLI is the first way that you can begin using Starter Pack. But what about the second way?

The GUI

We wanted to ensure that Starter Pack is as developer and beginner friendly as possible. It’s also the 21st Century, and not every technical task has to be carried out in the command line when nicer solutions are available. Therefore, we took inspiration from Vue CLI UI and made a Starter Pack GUI tool.

The Starter Pack GUI

Users have all of the options available in the CLI tool, plus the ability to pick where to create the project on their device.

Plans for the future

Starter Pack plan to make their tools extendable. Maybe there is a pack that you use a lot and would like to make some customizations to it. This is something Starter Pack plan to incorporate into future versions.

Starter Pack also have ambitious plans to help promote best practices. Alongside their CLI/GUI tool, they aim to craft best-in-class documentation to help you build our your projects. Developer technologies are constantly updating. But while the technologies improve, often the accompanying documentation does not. This may be in fault to either the owners of said technology, or simply because tutorials and guides written by the community are not updated (it’s a tough task, so in reality nobody is truly to blame here). Either way, we plan to tackle this by creating unified documents that will be curated and updated by experts in the field.

Conclusion

Starter Pack is a new piece of technology that offers a lot of promise and has big plans that will hopefully improve developer experience, along with the overall quality of software built. It’s a fully open source project and there’s a lot that still needs to be worked on. If you’re interested, go check out their website starterpk.com, reach out over Twitter, or make a Pull Request to any of their repos.