create-react-app in production?

During a recent interview programming demonstration, I was asked to create a simple react-based blog application. There was a time constraint and bonus points for adding certain features. To begin the process I was going to scaffold the project with create-react-app when I was told “Nobody uses create-react-app in production, don’t use it for this exercise”.
I was a bit taken-aback, but lacking major production-ready SPA experience, I didn’t question the statement. But it bugged me. Shortly afterwards, I began seeing a lot of conversations on using create-react-app in production.
Today I noticed that Dan Abrimov himself tweeted about the topic!
After reading through the open issue created on the create-react-app repo, it appears that there are plenty of people using create-react-app in their production applications. There are some YC alums using it, some IBM employees using it for internal projects and as you would expect, many side projects that use create-react-app.
If you are considering using create-react-app in production yourself, I’ve included some links below to some sites I found useful in my research. If you have any additional resources or are using CRA yourself in production, please share!
- Dave Ceddia’s tutorial “Create-react-app in production with Express”
- Andrew Van Sleer’s Egghead.io tutorial “ Build Your First Production Quality React App”
- Alex Lobera’s Medium article “Universal create-react-app, step by step”
