Project Watchtower is a TypeScript first foundation for creating universal (Server Side Rendered) React applications. It's point of difference is that it is highly configurable and allows you to use your own data loading, routing and other approaches.
While Project Watchtower has served us very well, https://vitejs.dev/ is an ESBuild based tool which meets all the goals which Watchtower set out to solve.
Project Watchtower was built to allow our team at Seven West Media to build multiple websites built using React and WebPack with server side rendering easily. Over time the drift of our configuration became hard to keep in sync, the JavaScript community moves fast and we want to keep up.
We have also put a lot of effort into solving problems like server side rendering in a reusable way and wanted all of our products to benefit easily from improvements we make over time. We also use TypeScript, and many of the great community options are Babel/Flow first.
We created Project Watchtower before many of the other community projects were available. Over time we have removed fringe responsibilites out of Project Watchtower to align more with the greater JS Communities. Though for various reasons, Project Watchtower is still a valid option for us, rather than migrating to another community project.
Create-react-app is great, but it is not very configurable. We need custom webpack and TypeScript config in our projects which made create-react-app not an option for us.
Next.JS comes with it's own libraries, data loader whereas we have used a number of other projects like react router, react helmet async and others.
Razzle is probably the closes to project watchtower in it's setup, simplicity. An option we may look into is moving Project Watchtower's server side rendering middlewares into a razzle plugin at some point.
Watchtower is broken up into a few different packages
@project-watchtower/cli- build / watch / debug commands@project-watchtower/runtime- universal components safe for both server and client side usage@project-watchtower/server- features of watchtower to be included in server bundles only.
- Webpack build
- By default it will build into a self contained /dist folder
- Cleaning
- Build metrics
- Server middlewares and helpers
- Server side rendering support
- Hot reloading support
- Including server hot reload support!
- Standalone server for client-only applications
Detailed documentation available in the docs folder:
- CLI Commands
- JavaScript API
- Configuration and Structure
- Building, Running and Debugging
- Developing Project Watchtower
Check out the example at examples/ssr-with-sass