Blogging-app with a Node server on Heroku

A minimal example of using a Node backend Blogging App (server for API, proxy, & routing) with a React frontend.

• 📐 Design Points
• 🕺 Demo
• 🚀 Deploy to Heroku
• 💻 Local Development

To deploy a frontend-only React app, use the static-site optimized
▶️ create-react-app-buildpack

Design Points

A combo of two npm projects, the backend server and the frontend UI. So there are two package.json configs and thereforce two places to run npm commands:

1. Node server: ./package.json
   • deployed automatically via heroku/nodejs buildpack
2. React UI: build/package.json
   • generated by create-react-app
   • deployed via build script in the Node server's ./package.json
   • module cache configured by cacheDirectories

Includes a minimal Node Cluster implementation to parallelize the single-threaded Node process across the available CPU cores.

Major Design Points

• Server code is implemented with express library.
• The server is RESTful.
• The database used is MongoDB which is a so-called document database.

Demo

Demo deployment: example API call from the React UI is fetched with a relative URL that is served by an Express handler in the Node server.

Deploy to Heroku

heroku create
git push heroku master

This deployment will automatically:

• detect Node buildpack
• build the app with
  • npm install for the Node server
  • npm run build for create-react-app
• launch the web process with npm start
  • serves ../build/build/ as static files
  • customize by adding API, proxy, or route handlers/redirectors

⚠️ Using npm 5’s new package-lock.json? We resolved a compatibility issue. See PR for more details.

👓 More about deploying to Heroku.

Local Development

Because this app is made of two npm projects, there are two places to run npm commands:

1. Node API server at the root ./
2. React UI in build/ directory.

Run the API server

In a terminal:

# Initial setup
npm install

# Start the server
npm start

Install new npm packages for Node

npm install package-name --save

Run the React UI

The React app is configured to proxy backend requests to the local Node server. (See "proxy" config)

In a separate terminal from the API server, start the UI:

# Always change directory, first
cd build/

# Initial setup
npm install

# Start the server
npm start

Install new npm packages for React UI

# Always change directory, first
cd build/

npm install package-name --save

Run the API server

In a terminal:

# Initial setup
npm install

# Start the server
npm start

Install new npm packages for Node

npm install package-name --save