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Ship A Client-Side React SPA

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Introduction

This is a client-side React boilerplate with the addition of a custom front-end server.

If you don't need to run your client-side application on a custom infrastructure and would rather just use a static hosting solution, use react-spa-clientside-cdn instead.

Why & What?

Most of the time, when you're building a client-side app, you can just upload your compiled static files to GitHub Pages, Surge, AWS S3/Cloudfront and be done with it. But there are some use cases where you want to run your own front-end infrastructure to have more control on how your assets are served. In this case, you can spin up a Nodejs server with NGINX in front of it to have total control of your front-end.

This is an example boilerplate to demonstrate a way that it could be done. This one is designed with Docker in mind, running two seperate containers, one for the NGINX the other for the Node. The docker-compose file can satisfy your development and deployment (with Swarm) needs. The NGINX image is already built and published, all you need to do is to develop the Client SPA, package it with Node.js server and publish your custom image.

The Stack

  • Docker for local testing and production. (Compose & Swarm)
  • NGINX as the reverse proxy.
  • Node/Express as the front-end server.
  • React/Redux/Redux-Saga for UI.
  • Glamor as a CSS-in-JS solution.
  • Pug for generating static HTML assets.

Getting Started

  • Prerequisites: docker, node and yarn

Clone the repo:

git clone https://github.com/ShippableBoilerplates/react-spa-clientside
rm -rf .git && git init

Development Mode:

Client

cd src/client

Install dependencies:

yarn install

Run in development mode via webpack-dev-server:

yarn dev

webpack-dev-server will be serving on: localhost:3000

Server

cd src/server

Install dependencies:

yarn install

Run server locally:

yarn start

Production Mode:

Manually (without NGINX):

cd src/client
yarn build/prod

cd ../server
yarn start

The compiled assets will be in the src/server/public folder. The server is configured to serve these assets once you run the above commands.

With Docker (recommended):

Get your image built and run the production container:

docker-compose up

Run with build flag if any of the source code is changed to update the image:

docker-compose up --build

This will spin up your app with nginx in front of express providing reverse proxy.

nginx will serve on: localhost:80

The nginx image is a custom image. You can replace that with another image but you need to update your compose file. It's configured as a reverse proxy and forwards requests to the Node server. It does the gzipping already, and various caching methods, additional custom headers can be implemented.

Additional Commands:

  • Run yarn lint for linting with auto fixing:
  • Run yarn test for testing the client-side application.
  • Run yarn cleanup to manually remove built assets.

Important Note:

Pay attention to the folder you're working in. To reduce the dependencies of the servers, this project now has two seperate package.json in client and server.