Very slow to create an app / Size of created directory is huge

Can you reproduce the problem with latest npm?

Yes, with current npm version of 4.0.3

Description

It is very slow to create a new app, on a decent connection (~800kB/s). Approximately 5 minutes.

I am teaching a course about React in University, and wanted the students to use CRA for easily getting started, however, for 50% of the students, the install time was so slow (more than 30 minutes), that I told them to use codepen instead. I also tried by giving them a USB stick of the created base folder, but it took an enormous amount of time to unzip the folder on their windows machines (30minutes, for > 60000 files apparently).

$ docker run test/cra-app du -hs 'foobaz'
114M    foobaz

The size of the created folder is of 114M, this seems extremely big, couldn’t we find a way to make this smaller ?

Expected behavior

The install to be faster / the directory size to be smaller

Actual behavior

The install is slow / the directory size is too big

Environment

Run these commands in the project folder and fill in their results:

1. npm ls react-scripts (if you haven’t ejected):

2. node -v: 4.7.0

3. npm -v: 4.0.3

4. Operating system: Docker argon inside linux

5. Browser and version: NA

Reproducible Demo

You can use this Dockerfile for reproducing :

FROM node:argon
# Create app directory
RUN mkdir -p /usr/src/app
WORKDIR /usr/src/app
RUN npm install -g npm
# Install app dependencies
RUN npm install -g create-react-app
RUN create-react-app foobaz

If they is no way to reduce the time of download and size of an app for now, do you have an idea of how I could give my students a way to have their base directory when I’m in linux, and they are on windows, without internet connection ?

[edi9999]

Thanks for the quick and full response, I will tell students to use npm version 3 and do it before the next course. Indeed, the issues that you linked to are very revelant and it would be great to see them fixed.

[tirthaguha]

can this be re-opened? On node 8.11.3, npm 5.6.0, Win7, it took 2332s Creating a new React app in [PATH]\react-marionette-angular.

Installing packages. This might take a couple of minutes. Installing react, react-dom, and react-scripts…

uglifyjs-webpack-plugin@0.4.6 postinstall [PATH]\react-marionette-angular\node_modules\uglifyjs-webpack-plugin node lib/post_install.js

• react@16.4.1
• react-dom@16.4.1
• react-scripts@1.1.4 added 1319 packages in 2332.344s

Success! Created react-marionette-angular at [PATH]\react-marionette-angular Inside that directory, you can run several commands:

It was much faster in npm 3.x, node 6.11.x win7