Yo frontend web-dev world, I know it’s early for Thanksgiving, but I’m grateful for Parceljs (parceljs.org). It’s an amazing tool because of the zero-configuration approach it promises for web-dev projects.

Disclaimer - I have no affiliation with Parcel, just a dev crush.

I started learning about bundlers and task runners back when Grunt was more popular.

I slowly evolved my understanding of the fragmented and complicated world of web development and understood that to use the latest technologies and specifications wasn’t as easy as updating to the latest version of Java which came with it’s own compiler.

I soon learnt about polyfills and how Babel was the champion of the polyfill world. A polyfill, in short, is something that adds code that a browser might not know.

Long story short, I had to first learn about how to setup Babel with Webpack, and then learn about file loaders, and code splitting and build paths and entry points and so on. All necessary to use modern ES6 syntax.

I did learn it. But I didn’t like it when I wanted to quickly setup a new project that uses all these modern features.

Enter Parcel! It’s so simple that it includes all of these things pre-configured for you ✨

All anyone needs now is an index.html file that has a script src entry to a javascript file (say index.js). This index.js file then could include other modules and so on. Parcel understands all. Honestly that should be their tagline.

I can’t speak for large apps and production builds where you might want a specific configuration that’s not easy to achieve with Parcel. But I know that it’s going to be my go-to when I think “Oh, wouldn’t it be cool if I can make…”.