[PWA] Use Workbox instead of sw-precache

[Sgiath]

It would be nice to use Workbox instead of sw-pracache for genrating service-worker.js file since it is officially supported by Google and has more features than sw-pracache. It has also official Webpack plugin so integration shouldn't be hard.
Some more info about Workbox is here https://developers.google.com/web/tools/workbox/

[wtgtybhertgeghgtwtg]

It's not the best argument, but switching to workbox-sw would trim the dependency tree, too, since sw-precache depends on meow and update-notifier.

[gaearon]

I don't really know much about either.
@jeffposnick Can you provide your insights?

[jeffposnick]

We just launched Workbox v1.0 last week, and I think it would be prudent to give it some time to mature before trying to integrate it into a general-purpose project like create-react-app. (sw-precache is a mature project, having been around since early 2015.)

In the medium-term, yes, migration should hopefully be a smooth process and would make sense. Maybe keep this issue open to track that?

CC: @addyosmani

[gaearon]

Sure, sounds good.

[sidharthachatterjee]

It's been a while since Workbox landed v1.0. I've used it in a few production apps and I think its mature enough to include in CRA.

What do you think, @gaearon and @jeffposnick? I'd be happy to work on a PR for this if you agree.

[jeffposnick]

Hello @sidharthachatterjee! I'm glad that Workbox has been... working... for you 😄

We're working on a pretty major rewrite of the Webpack integration as part of our upcoming Workbox v3 release, and have felt that once that's ready, it would be the right time to start moving over projects like create-react-app to use Workbox.

Moving over to Workbox now would lead to another potentially large transition when we went from v2 to v3.

CC: @goldhand @addyosmani

[bob-lee]

@jeffposnick trying to convert my personal project which was built on Angular and workbox-build@2.1.1 for caching static assets and dynamic contents of api calls, etc. to React using c-r-a. Wondering if it is possible to accomplish a 'complete' offline capability without doing eject?

Edit: Without doing eject, I could replace the default service-worker with workbox-generated one to add runtime caching, etc. Anyone interested can refer these changes:

// in registerServiceWorker.js
      const swUrl = `${process.env.PUBLIC_URL}/sw-default.js`;
      // const swUrl = `${process.env.PUBLIC_URL}/service-worker.js`;

[gaearon]

@jeffposnick What's the current status on this?