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What are presets?
A preset is a Neutrino-compatible configuration capable of building, modifying the build process, or interacting with a project as a result of building. Neutrino provides a few core presets to quickly get started building some popular project types, but anyone can inherit, extend, and modify these presets and tailor them to their project, team, or company preferences. You can even create your own presets from scratch.
If you are familiar with Babel presets, Neutrino presets work similarly. For example,
given the Babel preset babel-preset-react, you can compile React code with JSX
to vanilla JavaScript calls. Neutrino adopts this same concept by adapting Webpack into
a tool that understands configurations-as-packages, i.e. presets. Many more aspects of
development surround building a complete React project, for which Webpack is commonly used.
By encapsulating the common needs of a project type into a preset, Neutrino allows you to
avoid the upfront cost of configuring and instead focus on project development.
Not every project is the same, and oftentimes small tweaks need to be made to the build configuration in order to meet this need. Fortunately Neutrino presets can be modified and extended directly from the project you are building. No need to be locked in to a particular pattern, and no escape hatches that force you into maintaining the entire configuration should you need to make changes.
Presets can be easily distributing by publishing them to npm or GitHub and installing them in your project. This also allows others to discover and build projects based on your own presets.
Why not a boilerplate or alternative?
Boilerplates are great resources for scaffolding out application-specific code which would be difficult or tedious to generate for every project. Unfortunately many projects also bake in build configuration into this process, causing a lot of duplication. If you need to make a change to your build steps, you are forced to make that change across all your similar projects. Using a preset rather than a boilerplate keeps this process DRY.
Tools like Create React App have been fantastic improvements to the tooling ecosystem, but unfortunately only works on specific environments like React, and do not allow simple extensibility of the build configuration. To answer this new and similar projects are cropping up to build different types of projects, often duplicating efforts which miss out on the best practices to share with the other project types.