create-t3-app recently reached 90 stars on GitHub and is my most popular open source project with a lot of people contributing. Now you may be wondering, what the hell is it? Let’s take a look at the t3 stack and how you can use create-t3-app.
The T3 stack was made by Theo who is a really cool dev and makes awesome content on YouTube. The stack consists of:
I love this stack, if you want to know more about them checkout init.tips and this twitter thread from @dhravya.
The only downside of this stack is the boilerplate, I had to open the docs, install all the packages, create a bunch of files just to set it up.
Theo had also mentioned on stream how it would be very convenient to set up a project just by running npx create-t3-app. So I did just that!
create-t3-app makes it really convenient to scaffold a starter project using the T3 stack.
npx create-t3-app@latest
# or
yarn create t3-app
# or
pnpm create t3-app@latest
It will let you select the packages you want and install them and create all the files those packages need.
I started working on the CLI in May and back then I had no experience with Node CLIs, but it was definitely a great learning experience for me.
Now the project has matured a lot and it’s amazing to see Theo’s community opening issues and contributing everyday, it’s really great.
I have a lot of respect for OSS maintainers now because honestly, it is a really hard job. Looking at issues, reviewing and discussing PRs, it’s definitely a bit tiring.
I recently had burnout from this and took a 2 day break and just built a bunch of static sites. Theo’s community is awesome though, we agree on most things and I rarely write code for the CLI now, people just open issues and make PRs, I just have to review and merge them.
Overall this project has been a really great experience, I learnt so many things, from node CLIs to maintaining open source. Please do try the CLI out and open issues if you find bugs.
Thank you for reading!