Javascript

Introducing the SolidStart, TanStack Query and Tailwind CSS Starter kit

Mark Shenouda
3 min read
Introducing the SolidStart, TanStack Query and Tailwind CSS Starter kit
This article was written over 18 months ago and may contain information that is out of date. Some content may still be relevant, but please refer to official documentation for the latest information.

We are delighted to announce our SolidStart + TanStack + Tailwind Starter Kit on Starter.dev to help you build your next project with SolidStart, TanStack Solid Query, and Tailwind CSS in no time. In this article, we will walk you through the kit and how it is great for building your next project.

Why SolidStart?

Solid.js is a really cool new framework with a lot of amazing features. Its syntax is mostly like React syntax. However, they work in completely different ways behind the scenes.

Solid.js is a declarative, component-based library for building user interfaces. It is a highly customizable, low-level framework that gives you all of the building blocks you need to build bespoke designs without any opinionated styles that you have to fight to override. SolidStart is a meta-framework that helps you build your Solid.js apps with ease. It supports Client-side rendering, Server-side rendering, Streaming SSR, and Static site generation.

Vite

Vite is a new frontend build tool that significantly improves the frontend development experience. It consists of two major parts:

  • A dev server that provides rich feature enhancements over native ES Module imports (e.g. module hot-reloading, proper dependency analysis, etc).
  • A build command that bundles your code with Rollup, pre-configured to output highly optimized static assets for production.

Vite is designed from the ground up for the es-module era, and as such, it doesn't require a bundler like webpack or Parcel during development. It also doesn't require a complicated configuration file like snowpack. Instead, it leverages the browser's native support for ES modules (i.e. native ES imports) and the new spec proposal for importing CSS as modules. This means that Vite can provide instant feedback during development, and also enables features that are simply impossible with other tools, such as server-side rendering and static site generation.

Vite is designed to be framework-agnostic. It is not opinionated about your choice of framework, and it is also framework-agnostic in the sense that it doesn't require you to use a specific framework-specific toolchain. You can use Vite with any framework that supports native ES imports, including React, Vue, Svelte, Angular, and even vanilla JS.

Vite is also designed to be plugin-based. It is built on top of Rollup, which is a powerful and flexible bundler. However, Vite is not a wrapper around Rollup. Instead, it is a plugin-based build tool that uses Rollup under the hood. This means that you can use any Rollup plugin with Vite, and you can also create your own Vite plugins to customize Vite's behavior.

Why Tanstack?

TanStack is a full-stack framework for building web applications with Solid, Tailwind CSS, and TypeScript. It is a highly customizable, low-level framework that gives you all of the building blocks you need to build bespoke designs without any annoying opinionated styles that you have to fight to override.

Why Tailwind CSS?

Tailwind CSS is a utility-first CSS framework for rapidly building custom user interfaces. It is a highly customizable, low-level CSS framework that gives you all of the building blocks you need to build bespoke designs without any annoying opinionated styles you have to fight to override.

Testing

This kit comes with Vitest pre-configured. Vitest is a tool that is built with Vite in mind from the start, taking advantage of its improvements in DX, like its instant Hot Module Reload (HMR). This is Vitest, a blazing fast unit-test framework powered by Vite. It's a great alternative to Jest. It's fast and easy to use.

Conclusion

SolidStart is still in the beta phase. However, it has a lot of good DX improvements. This kit is great if you want to build a fast and lightweight fullstack web application. It provides you with everything you need from backend to frontend, even data caching and Tailwind configurations with two examples out of the box.

For more SolidJS resources, check our solidjs.framework.dev, where you can find courses, tutorials, and libraries for SolidJS. Also, you can create your next SolidJS project. Try our SolidJS starter kit from Starter.dev. It has a lot of tools pre-configured for you. If you have any questions or suggestions, please feel free to send them to us or reach out to us on Twitter.

About the author

Mark Shenouda

Mark Shenouda

Software Engineer

@MarkSShenouda@markshenouda

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