What is nwb?

nwb was a toolkit for building JavaScript web applications and libraries without needing to configure the underlying build tools yourself. It handled the setup for React, Preact, Inferno, and plain JavaScript projects, wrapping tools like Webpack and Babel so developers could start coding immediately rather than spending time on build configuration. The README opens with a clear deprecation notice: nwb is no longer maintained, and the author recommends using Vite instead. The project was built during a period when JavaScript tooling was fragmented and setting up a working development environment required manually coordinating many separate packages. nwb solved that by providing a single command-line tool that handled local development servers, testing, and production builds out of the box. While it was active, nwb could scaffold new projects with one command and gave you hot reloading during development, a test runner, and optimized production builds with no initial configuration file required. If you needed to adjust settings for your project, it exposed a smaller configuration surface than the underlying tools. It also supported publishing npm packages in multiple module formats for compatibility across environments. The author's note explains that Vite now does what nwb set out to do, is actively maintained, has a large ecosystem of plugins, and serves as the foundation for several popular frameworks. Anyone with a project that still uses nwb is encouraged to migrate. This repository remains public for reference but receives no further updates.