create-solid - SolidJS Project Setup Tool

I've been using create-solid for about a year now. It's the tool for starting new SolidJS projects - the community took it over after the core team archived the original version in September 2022.

How We Got Here

The original create-solid went dead in September 2022. Community said "fuck it" and took over with solid-cli, which actually works better and includes SolidStart commands.

Whatever package manager you're already using:

npm create solid@latest
pnpm create solid
yarn create solid
bun create solid  # ECONNRESET registry.npmjs.org:443 - fails 40% of the time
deno init --npm solid

Don't install it globally - just use npm create and it grabs the latest version. I learned this the hard way after spending 3 hours debugging why my project templates were missing TypeScript configs. Turns out I had solid-cli@0.2.1 installed globally while the latest was 0.3.4 with completely different template structures.

What It Actually Does

Asks three questions:

• Project name (defaults are fine)
• SolidStart or just Solid? (Pick SolidStart if you need SSR, plain Solid for SPAs)
• Which template? (They're all TypeScript because JavaScript templates got nuked in v0.3.0)

Template options:

• ts - Pick this and move on
• ts-vitest - Has Vitest if you test upfront (you don't)
• ts-uvu - UVU syntax is weird, skip it
• ts-unocss - UnoCSS docs are confusing as fuck
• ts-tailwindcss - 800KB but everyone knows the classes

Pick ts. Everything else is bikeshedding. I wasted an entire Tuesday comparing CSS frameworks when I could've just used plain CSS modules and shipped the damn feature.

The CLI Experience

Simple interactive prompt. No fancy graphics, just three questions and you're done. Way better than Create React App which dumps 50MB of dependencies on you, or Angular CLI which asks seventeen questions before it does anything.

What Breaks (And How to Fix It)

I've run create-solid on maybe 20 different projects now. Here's what actually happens:

How to Start a Project

## Make sure you're in an empty directory
npm create solid@latest my-solid-app
cd my-solid-app
npm install
npm run dev

That's the theory. In practice, I've seen it break three ways:

1. Windows username with spaces - create-solid chokes during extraction. My work laptop has "John Smith" as the username and it fails with EPERM: operation not permitted, mkdir 'C:\Users\John Smith\AppData\Local pm-cache\_cacache mp\git-clone-a1b2c3d4'. Run PowerShell as admin or just use WSL like a normal person.

2. Network timeouts - Hangs on package downloads, especially on corporate networks. You'll see fetchPackageMetaData stuck for 30+ seconds, then ECONNRESET registry.npmjs.org:443. Ctrl+C and run again. Usually works the second time because npm's retry logic is garbage.

3. npm cache corruption - Random EINTEGRITY errors like sha512-AAABBBCCC... integrity checksum failed. Delete ~/.npm and try again. Fixed it every time. Bonus: also clear node_modules/.cache if you're feeling paranoid.

The Questions It Asks

Three questions:

• Project name (defaults to folder name, just press Enter)
• SolidStart or regular Solid? (SolidStart if you need SSR, regular for SPAs)
• Which template? (Pick ts, trust me)

Defaults work 90% of the time. I only change them when I know I'm building something specific.

Template Reality Check

ts template: TypeScript + SolidJS + Vite. Clean setup, no surprises.

Testing templates save you 20 minutes of setup. Then you spend 3 hours figuring out mocking and async rendering anyway. I learned this debugging TypeError: Cannot read properties of undefined (reading 'signal') when testing components with createSignal() - turns out solid-testing-library's cleanup wasn't disposing signals properly in Vitest 1.2.x.

CSS framework templates (ts-unocss, ts-tailwindcss): Tailwind adds 800KB to your bundle but everyone knows the classes. UnoCSS is smaller but I gave up on the docs after 30 minutes.

Development Server and Build Stuff

All templates use Vite. On my machine:

• Dev server - 2 seconds cold start, instant hot reload (until HMR breaks with [vite] hmr update /src/App.tsx failed and you restart)
• TypeScript - Just works, no config needed (unless you import from solid-js/store wrong and get TS2307: Cannot find module)
• Production builds - Takes 8 seconds on small projects, 45 seconds on big ones (unless Vite's tree-shaking breaks your dynamic imports)

The standard commands:

• npm run dev - Development server
• npm run build - Production build
• npm run preview - Test the production build (saved me twice from broken builds)

Reality check: SolidStart builds are still weird compared to Next.js. Static generation fails with ReferenceError: document is not defined during SSG, or my personal favorite: Cannot read properties of undefined (reading 'default') with zero context. I spent 6 hours last month debugging a failed Vercel deployment that worked perfectly locally. Turns out SolidStart 1.0.8 has issues with dynamic imports in production builds - had to downgrade to 1.0.6.

Bottom Line

Testing templates save 30 minutes. CSS framework templates save 15 minutes. You'll rip out half the config anyway when building real features.

Pick ts and stop overthinking. I've wasted more time on template decisions than templates have ever saved me.