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Comment by Jasper_ | Hacker News Reader

I spent the day finally adding a modern build system / bundler to my side project, and I chose Parcel. Parcel is really cool! I really wish they'd stop calling it "zero-configuration". It has configuration options (--out-dir, --public-url), there's just no configuration file for them. I really wish they would make one, since it's annoying to have your configuration be hidden in a batch file.

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Ironically what was supposed to be a feature is now something that needs to be fixed.

I think really the value proposition here is “very little if any setup needed” and making so there was no setup possible may have gone too far.

The planned v2 of parcel will have a configuration file.

Without investigating, I genuinely can’t tell whether you are joking or not. It seems plausible, save for the fact that would completely undermine the primary marketing message.

Bear in mind that this is relative to webpack. A few lines practically is zero compared to a webpack configuration.

Although WebPack 4 has some sane defaults that you can use it zero-config

Spoke to one of the creators on a conference and he confirmed it will have some config in V2.

There aren't many options you can specify, besides we have enough .json in the root folder.

Yeah, In my experience Parcel is nice, but Meteor does a better job at offering a zero-config build system than parcel. Because it also provides the node server (which may of course be seen as a drawback to some) it allows to do stuff like multiple bundles for multiple browsers, exact code splitting using dynamic imports etc. with actual zero-config.

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