Create React App → Vite

create-react-app has been unmaintained since 2023 and the React team removed it from the official “Start a New React Project” page. Vite is the modern equivalent — faster dev server, native ESM, smaller production bundles, actively maintained.

There’s a community codemod that handles ~90 % of the work:

npx migrate-to-vite@latest cra

This guide walks the rest.

Prerequisites

• A working CRA app (react-scripts ≥ 5).
• Node 18+.
• Mushi web SDK or React adapter already installed.

Migration checklist

Common gotchas

• process.env. Vite doesn’t inject process.env at build time. The codemod rewrites the obvious cases; greps for process.env.REACT_APP_ catch the rest.
• Absolute imports without aliases. CRA had implicit absolute imports via jsconfig.json / tsconfig.json baseUrl. Vite respects tsconfig.json paths but you must also configure the vite-tsconfig-paths plugin (the codemod adds it).
• Worker imports. CRA used a webpack-specific Worker loader; Vite uses native ?worker URL imports. The codemod won’t migrate workers for you.
• @craco/craco users. If you used craco for custom webpack config, port those overrides to vite.config.ts plugins manually.

Rollback

Branched in step 1, so a git checkout main reverts cleanly. If you’ve already merged and discovered an issue post-deploy, revert the merge — CRA still builds (it’s just unmaintained, not broken).

Mushi compatibility

The Mushi web SDK and React adapter both work identically on CRA and Vite. The only post-migration change you should observe is faster dev refreshes (Vite HMR is roughly 10× faster than CRA’s webpack dev server) — Mushi hot-reloads cleanly through both.

References

• migrate-to-vite codemod 
• Vite docs — env variables 
• Vitest — drop-in Jest replacement 
• @mushi-mushi/react SDK reference