• Introduction
  • Development mode
  • Production mode
• Quick Start
• Documentation
  • URLs
  • Babel
  • Webpack
  • Webpack dev server
  • Nodemon
  • Concurrently

This is a simple full stack React application with a Node.js and Express backend. Client side code is written in React and the backend API is written using Express.

In the development mode, we will have 2 servers running. The front end code will be served by the webpack dev server which helps with hot and live reloading. The server side Express code will be served by a node server using nodemon which helps in automatically restarting the server whenever server side code changes.

In the production mode, we will have only 1 server running. All the client side code will be bundled into static files using webpack and it will be served by the Node.js/Express application.

# Clone the repository
git clone https://github.com/aaronpurt/retail-sales

# Go inside the directory
cd retail-sales

# Install dependencies
npm install

# Start development server
npm run dev

# Build for production
npm run build

# Start production server
npm start

https://github.com/FortAwesome/react-fontawesome#get-started

https://github.com/reactjs/react-chartjs

https://github.com/react-tools/react-table

Babel helps us to write code in the latest version of JavaScript. If an environment does not support certain features natively, Babel will help us to compile those features down to a supported version. It also helps us to convert JSX to Javascript.

.babelrc file is used describe the configurations required for Babel. Below is the .babelrc file which I am using.

{
    "presets": ["env", "react"]
}

Babel requires plugins to do the transformation. Presets are the set of plugins defined by Babel. Preset env allows to use babel-preset-es2015, babel-preset-es2016, and babel-preset-es2017 and it will transform them to ES5. Preset react allows us to use JSX syntax and it will transform JSX to Javascript.

Webpack is a module bundler. Its main purpose is to bundle JavaScript files for usage in a browser.

webpack.config.js file is used to describe the configurations required for webpack. Below is the webpack.config.js file which I am using.

1. entry: Here the application starts executing and webpack starts bundling
2. output path and filename: the target directory and the filename for the bundled output
3. module loaders: Module loaders are transformations that are applied on the source code of a module. We pass all the js file through babel-loader to transform JSX to Javascript. SCSS files are passed through sass-loaders, css-loaders and style-loaders to load and bundle CSS files. Fonts and images are loaded through url-loader.
4. Dev Server: Configurations for the webpack-dev-server which will be described in coming section.
5. plugins: clean-webpack-plugin is a webpack plugin to remove the build folder(s) before building. html-webpack-plugin simplifies creation of HTML files to serve your webpack bundles. It loads the template (public/index.html) and injects the output bundle.

Webpack dev server is used along with webpack. It provides a development server that provides live reloading for the client side code. This should be used for development only.

The devServer section of webpack.config.js contains the configuration required to run webpack-dev-server which is given below.

devServer: {
    port: 3000,
    open: true,
    proxy: {
        "/api": "http://localhost:8080"
    }
}

Port specifies the Webpack dev server to listen on this particular port (3000 in this case). When open is set to true, it will automatically open the home page on startup. Proxying URLs can be useful when we have a separate API backend development server and we want to send API requests on the same domain. In our case, we have a Node.js/Express backend where we want to send the API requests to.

Nodemon is a utility that will monitor for any changes in the server source code and it automatically restart the server. This is used in development only.

nodemon.json file is used to describe the configurations for Nodemon. Below is the nodemon.json file which I am using.

{
  "watch": ["server/"]
}

Here, we tell nodemon to watch the files in the directory server where out server side code resides. Nodemon will restart the node server whenever a file under server directory is modified.

Below are the npm script commands used.

"client": "webpack-dev-server --mode development --devtool inline-source-map --hot",
"server": "nodemon server/index.js",
"dev": "concurrently \"npm run server\" \"npm run client\""