Add devDependencies for custom templates

Is your proposal related to a problem?

Hey 👋good job on the recent release.

I’m really keen to make a custom template for CRA but want to add dev dependencies. Are there plans to add support for this is the near-ish future? Happy to throw up a PR if you’re busy with other stuff.

I made a fork of CRA a while ago so I could add custom templates but a community-supported effort is much more appealing!

Describe the solution you’d like

Simply adding another key to template.json for "devDependencies".

Where dependencies start to be installed here, there could be a function to wrap the reusable stuff (building up args, spawning process etc.) that could take an dependency type and the relevant slice of template.json.

Describe alternatives you’ve considered

Nothing at the moment as the template feature is obviously very new.

Additional context

This could potentially open up the possibility of adding peerDependencies too but I haven’t really worked with them directly before, so not sure if this is useful/appropriate.

[mrmckeb]

Hi @tomvalorsa, the CRA team have historically been against having devDependencies in the templates, as most users run tests/etc on the CI anyway, so there’s rarely a time where you would only want to install one set of dependencies.

That being said, things change, and we’re always open to discussion if people have good reasoning for change.

@lukaszfiszer is right, you can use separate configs for things like husky - but we’re open to allowing more keys to be added to the template.json file.

I’d personally be in favour of adding a “additional keys” property, which would allow things like eslint and prettier keys - and would exclude dependency keys (as they would need to be processed). Or we could whitelist config keys - but that would be a slippery slope I think. Maybe we could call the key additionalKeys or packageConfigs?

[lzm0x219]

I want to support not only devDependencies, but also a complete package.json configuration