Project scaffolding is a technique for auto-generating files to support a specific project structure. PWA Studio provides scaffolding tools to simplify project creation and help developers get started.
Developers should use the PWA Studio libraries Magento publishes to the NPM package repository. Early adopters of the PWA Studio project forked and worked off the project repository, but this practice is not recommended now that scaffolding tools are available.
The venia-concept package is a good example of a PWA Studio starter application. Most of its UI and logic come from its @magento/venuia-ui and @magento/peregrine dependencies, so it has very little code in its own project folder.
Since the project structure is small and simple, PWA Studio scaffolding tools use this project as the default template for creating new storefront projects. Customizing these projects is as simple as importing small pieces of venia-ui and combining them with custom code.
Using the @magento/create-pwa project initializer is the fastest way to get a PWA Studio project set up for development. It is a user-friendly version of the create-project sub-command in the pwa-buildpack CLI tool.
Since the package name begins with create-, it is considered a project generator and, the command can be run as @magento/pwa. Run this project generator directly from the NPM package respository with Yarn:
yarn create @magento/pwa
Or with NPM:
npm init @magento/pwa
This command launches an interactive questionnaire in the command line for configuring different parts of the project.