In reply to https://x.com/tannerlinsley/status/1866205788982890948

[laurentlahmy]

ok this is very specific to me but:

• first of all, my use case is simply to add static site generation to my app's landing page, so that it has better chances of being picked up by SEO.

• When reading the docs it basically feels like I’d be better off not using this feature https://tanstack.com/router/latest/docs/framework/react/start/static-prerendering#static-prerendering

• I find the getting started of tanstack start kind of misleading. Why would I want to manually go through these steps when it feels like the correct, latest, best way to start is to clone the repo and copy paste an example.

• If you follow the getting started, you probably come from a tanstack router + vite, and all the sudden you’re just running vinxi dev and not sure at all what goes on because vite is hidden away.

• It doesn’t help that vinxi’s vite plugin page is “coming soon” https://vinxi.vercel.app/guide/vite-plugins.html. I thought it was just not possible yet to add custom vite plugins.

• Whereas if you clone an example suddenly the vite plugins are available in app.config.ts and things feel a bit more familiar.

• when I tried to understand how to add a custom script to a start project, I couldn’t find it in the docs, and I couldn’t find it in examples.

• I had to look at the github repo in hope some issue would mention it. I found a PR that introduced the feature feat(start): move scripts,links, and meta to the head #2571, which is great, but the examples were added to tanstack router examples (basic-ssr-file-based and basic-ssr-streaming-file-based), not to tanstack start example.

• so even if you want to start by cloning an example, it’s a bit confusing that the most up to date start examples are among tanstack router examples

• When I tried to add tailwindcss v4, vite + tanstack router was giving me errors that I could overcome, while with start / vinxi I’m stuck at

  vinxi v0.5.1
  TypeError [ERR_INVALID_URL_SCHEME]: The URL must be of scheme file
  at fileURLToPath (node:internal/url:1499:11)
  at finalizeResolution (node:internal/modules/esm/resolve:258:42)
  at moduleResolve (node:internal/modules/esm/resolve:913:10)
  at defaultResolve (node:internal/modules/esm/resolve:1037:11)
  at nextResolve (node:internal/modules/esm/hooks:748:28)
  at resolveExtensions (file:///Users/ll/code/projects/prettyfeedback-2/node_modules/.pnpm/tsx@4.19.2/node_modules/tsx/dist/esm/index.mjs?1733776654115:2:2938)
  at resolveBase (file:///Users/ll/code/projects/prettyfeedback-2/node_modules/.pnpm/tsx@4.19.2/node_modules/tsx/dist/esm/index.mjs?1733776654115:2:3172)
  at resolveDirectory (file:///Users/ll/code/projects/prettyfeedback-2/node_modules/.pnpm/tsx@4.19.2/node_modules/tsx/dist/esm/index.mjs?1733776654115:2:3584)
  at resolveTsPaths (file:///Users/ll/code/projects/prettyfeedback-2/node_modules/.pnpm/tsx@4.19.2/node_modules/tsx/dist/esm/index.mjs?1733776654115:2:4073)
  at resolve (file:///Users/ll/code/projects/prettyfeedback-2/node_modules/.pnpm/tsx@4.19.2/node_modules/tsx/dist/esm/index.mjs?1733776654115:2:4447) {
  code: 'ERR_INVALID_URL_SCHEME'
  }

  which is hard to understand, and I feel powerless about. I understand that there’s just inherent complexity when doing SSR, and I'm not the ninjest of all ninjas, but I don’t feel like I’m helped in making sense of what actually is going on.

Bonus points (not in the original list)

• Current deployment option on cloudflare (using cloudflare pages) is not ideal when you want to host on cloudflare. To the best of my knowledge there is no persistent logging or error reporting on cloudflare pages generated workers. They just introduced them for regular workers. Here's an overview of what features may be missing from pages.
• I assume a swagger / scalar type of openAPI UI isn't really feasible or top priority (didn't try), but it's a nicety that's hard to let go.

As a consequence I'd rather stick to a proper frontend / backend distinction for now and use a hono based backend on a cloudflare worker for observability and a scalar openAPI UI.