Request for Fuller Documentation & Debugging Resources for New Users

[BPDanek]

I tried to use snowpack for my react+typescript webapp. I ended my attempt because it wasn't clear how I was supposed to get past (likely) a configuration mistake on my part:

[@snowpack/plugin-typescript] Command exited with error code: 
Error: Command failed with ENOENT: tsc --noEmit --watch
spawn tsc ENOENT

I'm still not sure what that error is asking of me, but I know this:

1. When using Typescript, Snowpack mentions that it has some built in Typescript. It also has a @snowpack/plugin-typescript, and @snowpack/plugin-babel.
   It's not clear which of these 3 options are what I need for my Typescript + React app. Some discussion on how much typescript support Snowpack has on its own, when to use the typescript plugin, and when to use the babel plugin would be helpful.

2. The description of the various fields in the config file isn't clear from the documentation either. I understand that this tool is for professional use, but descriptions of terms and fields (at least at a high level) would nice. For example, if I am looking at what my config should include, config.proxy provides a great explanation for an experienced user, but for a beginner or intermediate developer the description doesn't provide any information to dive deeper into. You could try look up the terms, but without context related to the terms its hard to get a confident answer. I didn't even kow I needed this on my web bundler docs, but when I checked out Webpack's site, I found a lot_ of advice on how to get started.

3. If your create-app-template had annotations/descriptions about the configs are setup the way they are, people who may be migrating to Snowpack will have an easier time. You've already made the create-app templates, this would just help people reverse engineer all the snowpack requirements faster and get their results sooner.

4. It would be helpful if there were more descriptive debugging tools for setting up/configuring webpack. There are potentially a lot of developers who boostrap with this software without devOps professionals, and it can be really confusing to set this up. Some method to tell you what's going wrong and where during setup would be great. A way to figure out what features to include in this could be aggregated from the "Issues" tab on this site. If people set something up wrong, and aren't sure what they did wrong, that's an indicator that there should be more descriptions of what's going wrong during setup.

I hope these suggestions help you folks decide new features/directions to move forward with. I am a fan of what's going on with this product. I provide this advice in hopes it helps your team build a good product, and an a sturdier user base.

[FredKSchott]

Fixed this issue (with a helpful error message) here: https://github.com/snowpackjs/snowpack/pull/2299/files#diff-6412cb08c2dbbb9c42f56b12410d093caff177a5e294b37ceae9cecf5aae0604R32

[FredKSchott]

100% agreed that our error messages could be more helpful. It's something that I'd like to work on improving now that v3.0 is out!

[Johnrobmiller]

Bump! I ran into the same problems, and I had the same thoughts about the need for a fuller documentation. Documentation is super important!! A lot of software companies do not understand this. In my opinion, having great writers is almost as important as having great engineers!