create-react-app with a ExpressJs server on Heroku

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

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

⤵️ Switching from 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. package.json for Node server & Heroku deploy
   • heroku-postbuild script compiles the webpack bundle during deploy
   • cacheDirectories includes react-ui/node_modules/ to optimize build time
2. react-ui/package.json for React web UI
   • generated by create-react-app

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

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

git clone https://github.com/GeekRishabh/Host-cra.git
cd Host-cra/
heroku create
git push heroku master

This deployment will automatically:

• detect Node buildpack
• build the app with
  • npm install for the Node server
  • heroku-postbuild for create-react-app
• launch the web process with npm start
  • serves ../react-ui/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.

👓 More about deploying to Heroku.

Local Development

Run the API Server

In a terminal:

# Initial setup
npm install

# Start the server
npm start

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 react-ui/

# Initial setup
npm install

# Start the server
npm start