redwood: Initial app creation time is still too long

Attached at the end is the log: note the 107.20s. clock time

I used many different JavaScript development tools and frameworks - all of them take a lot less time to create the minimalistic app skeleton. Even making the needed accommodation for the fact that RW creates the full-stack app, 107.2 secs is a too big number.

Probably the fastest way to address this initially is to not run the yarn install as a part of the first-time app creation, resulting in 107.0 shrunk to likely 15.0 The developer would have to type both commands yarn create redwood-app ./test followed by yarn install - the developer would not mind that and RW would not be blamed for a long lasting install phase.

I am not sure how to handle the creation of the information which follows the yarn install (is there some “callback” for yarn install??)

yarn create redwood-app ./test
yarn create v1.22.5
[1/4] Resolving packages...
[2/4] Fetching packages...
info fsevents@1.2.12: The platform "win32" is incompatible with this module.
info "fsevents@1.2.12" is an optional dependency and failed compatibility check. Excluding it from installation.
[3/4] Linking dependencies...
[4/4] Building fresh packages...

success Installed "create-redwood-app@0.26.2" with binaries:
      - create-redwood-app
  √ Creating Redwood app
    √ Creating directory 'c:\work\temp1\test'
  √ Installing packages
    √ Checking node and yarn compatibility
    √ Running 'yarn install'... (This could take a while)

Thanks for trying out Redwood!

We've created your app in 'c:\work\temp1\test'
Enter the directory and run 'yarn rw dev' to start the development server.

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Done in 107.20s.

About this issue

Original URL
State: closed
Created 3 years ago
Reactions: 1
Comments: 16 (13 by maintainers)

Most upvoted comments

@Josh-Walker-GM has addressed some of this, it seems, with the goal of getting to yarn install improvements sometime in the future…

Some create-redwood-app improvements:

Install size is 83% smaller (117MB to 19.2MB)

Overall package dependency count reduced by >60% (461 to 167)

Benchmarks on creating a project (without yarn-install) shows 60% speed improvement (avg of 13.7s to 5.4s)

We’ve got more ideas on how to go even further

pantheredeye on May 24, 2023

@adriatic I’m wondering if we are all on the same wave, so let’s check that 😃

What is it that you want to achieve? Is it “just” an appearance of things being fast? Because I feel that having a “super fast” create RW would kinda be useless if the user would still need to perform yarn install to do anything meaningful after the create RW command.

So yes, you gained 50 seconds, and then you lose the 50 seconds again by 100% of the time needing to run yarn install anyways (Disregarding the fact that we might be able to make that quicker).

You made me curious by your statement that other “frameworks” don’t do this, I just checked Create React App, but they also run yarn install directly after you create the app, and if I look at for example Ruby on Rails, they run bundle install as well as part of the rails new command.

So yes, you get the perception of RW being fast, and Yarn being a bottleneck, but I’m personally not so sure if that is fair to our users. It’s not as if they can run RW without dependencies being installed.

jvanbaarsen on Mar 7, 2021