Overview

This article covers scaffolding a production-ready React single-page application using Vite, TypeScript, and Tailwind CSS v4. This is the frontend that gets built into static assets and served from S3 + CloudFront.

Tech Choices

Vite over Create React App

CRA is deprecated. Vite is the modern standard — it uses native ES modules for near-instant dev server startup and produces an optimized production build via Rollup.

TypeScript

Type safety catches bugs at compile time instead of runtime. The CloudFormation templates and the site itself are both infra-as-code; TypeScript gives the same discipline on the frontend.

Tailwind CSS v4

Tailwind v4 (released 2024) is a ground-up rewrite.…