I'm working on a project for adding an external pre-registration page with Stripe to a Wordpress website.
The wordpress is already in place. But the pre-registration page needed the Stripe module, working on back-end...
So I've decided to make a SPA outside this wordpress to have this pre-registrations set up for the next customers.
But now, I'm struggling from days to find how to put this project online, I may definitely need your help for that.
I have this file structure:
File structure
It's nothing more than a single page + a single css file and a single server.js file, that I need to start to interact with the Stripe API.
But I also need some modules like Stripe, which is the key function of this project.
I thought about bundling it with webpack (only the back-end, as the front is only composed of 1 html and 1 css file). Then upload it on my web host.
Haven't found any working way to do so.
I'd like to try some cloud services like Netlify, but I don't even think that it could work without bundling the server side
Everything works perfectly on localhost, but I'm absolutely unable to make it works in prod with a real domain name. And I'm already late to deliver it.
Do you have an idea on how I could do that?
Thanks
Related
I have developed and hosted few react applications but I'm still confused about the word server side rendering. So, I'm curious to know what is the benefit of serving my react applications from an express server.
Thank you as I look forward to your response.
Please consider clarifying your question, because I don't know also if you use next.js or nuxt.js.
Angular, React, Vue.js are JavaScript frontend frameworks/libraries, which means they are using JavaScript language.
The websites on the Internet contain HTML, CSS, JavaScript Vanilla code.
The application you developed using React.js needs to use React.js library source code, and then you need the React.js code to be compiled to JavaScript Vanilla code because the browser at the end needs a JavaScript native code that it can read.
When I need to see your hosted website, I need to write the domain name to see it, so the HTTP request at the end goes to the server which is hosting your react app, thus if your react application contains just a static content, for example, a landing HTML page, then there is no need for server-side rendering from Express(Node.js), Ruby, PHP, Java,...
What I mean by static content is content that doesn’t change in response to different users, all of them will get the same content.
Notice you can host a static website in Github and you still don't need any server-side rendering...
Let's have a small application for a better explanation:
If you developed a Portfolio that contains a description of yourself, images of your projects, skills, then here there is no need for a server-side rendering.
But if you developed a system that lets a user who has permission to create a short link from a full URL, then you need a backend server(like Java, Ruby, C#, PHP,...) to host the logic code in order to generate a tiny URL from the full URL, and then save it in a Database, that way any user can click the generated tiny URL then this request goes to your backend server which needs to redirect the user with correct full URL, an application like this cannot be done using React.js alone, you need a server to handle the logic.
Returning to your answering your question: "So, I'm curious to know what is the benefit of serving my react applications from an express server."
If you have static content you can avoid using Express, but if you think your application needs some backend logic in the future, then Express or any other backend framework will help you in that.
*Notice when you have a static website, and you tried to edit the content of it, the users which already visited your website, their browser might cached your website content unless (they disabled this option in their browser), so if your website is cached in users' browsers they might not get the updated content unless you changed the static website file name for example by adding ?092130123 to file name in order to let the users' browser download the updated data
Not long ago , we used to have server render pages and then React came for client side rendering and single page application.It introduced virtual DOM's and changed the way we write our code.
We require all these react libraries and install them as dependencies before writing our codes. Now we can break into many components , have many css and scss files including images. But at the end we will build the files, make compact bundle and serve from build folder.
Express get route
app.get('*', (req,res) =>{
res.sendFile(path.join(__dirname+'/client/build/index.html'));
});
Heres, What I have understood :
Build folder is the place where webpack combines all the files and create minified bundle ready for deployment. That file is basically simple HTML and JS files which every browser can understand. As all the browser doesn't understand ES6 and much more, we have to convert all these files into plain language that every browser can understand.
Also, webpack-dev server is only for development purposes and we won't be running it into production.
Is virtual DOM/Real DOM just for development purposes? or
are those react libraries also trans-piled while building the minified files? If later is the case , react is run on background mode on client's browser? I want to know how react takes care of client side routing after the building the app.
How do you manage github repositories for Node-React app? Do you keep two different repositories one for front end and other for back-end? Whats the industry standard?
If you keep two repository, how do you deploy the front-end code? As you can't run the webpack-dev-server into production. Nor you can specify the public static (build folder) in your back-end(express server) as they are separated in two repos. How does, either the integration of these two repositories take place( lets say we have two AWS EC2 instance, one for each) or front-end get served from the front-end repo??). Can you actually use something like npm serve in production ??
what am I trying to do ?
I want to deploy my node-react app on AWS. I have only one repository on github. I have one folder "client" inside my repo where all the react code sits with its package.json file. All the other files for server are inside root folder (server doesn't have its own folder and files are scattered inside root folder). So there are two package.json files, one inside root folder for server and one inside client folder.I am planning to run my-node app on a docker container.
Please help me understand the core concepts and standard practices for code hosting and deployment keeping large scale enterprise application in picture.
I would not go into explaining all the points in your question here because, #Arnav Yagnik and #PrivateOmega have both done a brilliant job at explaining most of them. I would definitely recommend you to read their answers properly and read the links provided for more information before reading this answer.
I would like to address your question of deploying a Node-React application. In production, generally, we have different deployments (or "repositories" as you mention in your question) for both the front-end (React) and back-end (Node). This allows your back-end to sit in an EC2 instance, for example, with auto-scaling to make sure that it can cope up with all the requests coming in.
As mentioned in the previous answers, and in your question as well, webpack compiles and minifies the React files into simple HTML and JS files, which most browsers can run (I'm not going to explain VirtualDOM here because it has already been perfectly explained in other answers). You would then take these minified files and serve them from an S3 bucket for example, because again, it is a single page application (also discussed in the other answers) and the business logic is already in the minified JS files and its just simply sending all requests to your back-end server.
Now for front-end, you can use TravisCI for example to deploy the build folder (the one you talk about in your question) to an EC2 instance and serve your files using NGINX or if you can configure a CDN deployment properly, you can serve the files from an S3 bucket for the most optimal performance.
You can think of serving the React application like sending a cryptic block of code to your user's browser. Now you can deploy this cryptic block of code to a publicly available S3 bucket, and serve it from there. Again, because of webpack and minification/uglification, no on would be able to make any proper sense of what your original code was, remember that you can still access all the code in Chrome's Sources tabs for example.
I would like to address this with different approach.
Server Rendered Pages : The concept has not changed, server when encountered with a DOC request it has to respond with a html. Now HTML may or may not contain scripts(can be either inline or a external server address). In case of question's context you can still ship HTML where it will download scripts that you have written(may include react or not). for most cases you can ship empty html with scripts tags which will download the scripts over network and execute them which would contain all the rendering logic.
To Answer your questions :
1st : There is no background mode in a single threaded JS(unless we want to talk about workers but we can leave them out for this discussion). By writing in code you are not interacting with any DOM. You are instructing your components(extended by React) when to change their state and when to re-render(setState). React internally calculates the virtual DOM and compare to Real DOM to calculate actual changes that are to be made on Real DOM(this is very abstract answer, to get more understanding please read react docs, Baseline here is you are not interacting with any DOM just instructing React core library when to update and what is the updated state)
2nd : If you want to support SSR(server rendered pages). I would suggest to make 2 folders , client(this would include all client components and logic) and server(would include all server side logic) with different package.json as packages differ for both applications.There is no such industry standard here, what floats your boat should work but generally making directories based on logical entities should satisfy separation and maintainability, if in future you think you want to fork out server and client in separate repos , it would definitely make the process easy.
3rd : You shun running webpack-dev-server in production. Files are generally not obfuscated hence payload is heavy(not to forget your written code is out there). Even if you want to make different repos, server can spit out html and html can request scripts with your client server.
How to deploy : Deploy your code and run :
node server/app.js
and in app.js you can write the location block what you have mentioned.
P.S. : If you just need a server with that location block. do you really need a express server? You can upload the client build to a CDN and route your domain to serve index.html from the CDN(s3 bucket can also be used here)
I would like to start off with clearing up the terminologies as much as I can.
Like you said server rendered pages was a more prominent standard in the past, but it hasn't changed at all with the introduction of React, because even React has the support for Server rendering or SSR, which means HTML pages are generated at server side and then served to clients using browser.
And client side rendering means, a HTML page is loaded to browser and then javascript code renders things on top of those HTML pages and make them interactive.
And single page application concept is that we have only a single HTML file or base HTML page on top of which based on user interactions and data from server it is rewritten continuously.
Virtual Dom is an amazing concept introduced by React. React library code recreates the structure of all elements(called DOM elements) of a HTML page in the memory in a tree form. This enables React algorithm called Fiber to reconcile appropriate changes as per route update or any other changes first on this tree like structure before translating them onto the real elements in the HTML page.
Babel is a transpiler to transpile latest features that browser engines haven't started supporting to code that they can understand, usually ES6+ code into pre-ES6 because all browser supports that. In React application, if you have written application using JSX syntax, babel supports transforming JSX into normal javascript also.
Yes, breaking up of pages into many components is possible due to compositional nature of components by React which means we can build complex things by combining small and more focussed things.
At the end before serving it to end users, we can't have web application lag due to the huge size of code, so during the build process, things like minifying(removing whitespace etc) and other optimization like combining multiple javascript files into one etc are done, and then compact bundle is served from build folder like you said.
Yes, build folder is where webpack does the minifcation and combination to create a bundle as small as possible. It is basic HTML and JS files that is understood by every browser, and if the code contains something that a particular browser doesn't support, appropriate support code or something called polyfill is also bundled with it. Technically you can't say browsers only understand pre-ES6 code because a lot of browser engines have implemented plenty of ES6 features already.
Webpack dev server is just used to serve a webpack application over a port like a node.js server and gives us features like live-reloading which is needed when you constantly make changes to your application codebase and it isn't needed at production because like we said previously, at production time it's just HTML and JS and nobody ever makes any changes on these files.
Virtual DOM is a memory representation or concept used by React Code just like we have stacks and queues and it not just used at development time. Yes and No. Because I think appropriate parts of react source code which is required to run the application would also be bundled before generating the production bundle.
I would say, don't have a preset way of things, because it is totally upto the developer and the team, because I have seen people using 2 seperate repos because frontend people work on frontend things whereas backend people work on backend things. But there's also a case when everyone's a fullstack developer and you can Technically have it in a single repo with a single package.json and use the backend to serve the frontend files and you have to manually install each react dependency and cannot directly use CRA or create-react-app like generator.
What has 2 repositories to do with front-end deployment in production? You don't need to run webpack-dev-server to server files in production. You can create a production bundle and then setup any http server to serve the generated bundle.
Regarding your current scenario I would say instead of having 2 package.json, you can go with a single package.json and install all dependencies together or go with a monorepo approach using something like lerna or yarn workspaces.
But for a total beginner I would suggest 2 separate repositories to encounter less problems.
And a bonus point if you are not aware, you can write React in pre-ES6 code and also without JSX as well.
1) virtual DOM is basically to say that you are calling a function of react not the actual function which does manipulation on the real DOM
like this one
document.getElementById("demo").innerHTML ="Helloworld"
modifies the actual dom
but this
ReactDOM.render(
<HelloMessage name="Taylor" />,
document.getElementById('demo')
);
if you see this properly you aren't doing anything directly on the dom you are just giving the react function control to do things , internally react take cares of modifying the that dom element demo whenever the react wants to re-render it based on its own logic which is what they claim as optimized which is why people use it in first place. Yes when you build your code with webpack it does include react in it which is part of that minified code, so if you see any of the error stacktrace in development you do see react is the starting point for it
2) I think its a choice to be made, as there are not restrictions on this
3) Coming to deployment , In general if you want use nodejs you might choose expressjs server type of deployment but otherwise generally its better to use a high performance server like Nginx or Apache or else if you just don't want to get into this whole drama of things people generally use heroku based deployment or else people are using special platforms like netlify,surge.sh these days (its super easy to deploy on these platforms).
I believe others have done a pretty good job explaining the React Virtual DOM. In a simple and practical way, I’ll attempt to explain how I (would) manage the deployment of a dynamic website (including medium-sized enterprise systems) using NodeJS and React. I’ll also attempt not to bore you.
Imagine for once that React never existed and that you were building a traditional Server-Side Rendered application. Each time the user hits a route, the controller works with the model to perform some business logic and returns a view. In NodeJS, this view is usually compiled using a template engine such as handlebars. If you reflect for a second, it becomes obvious that the view could be any html content which is then sent back to the browser as a response.
This is a typical response that could be sent back:
<html>
<head>
<title>Our Website</title>
<style></style>
<script src="/link/to/any/JS/script"></script>
</head>
<body>
<h1>Hello World </h1>
</body>
</html>
If this response hits the browser, obviously “Hello World” is displayed on the screen.
Now, with this simple approach, we can do powerful things!
OPTION 1:
We can designate one controller to handle all incoming routes app.get("*", controllerFunc) and render one view for our entire server.
OPTION 2:
We could ask multiple controllers to handle different routes and render route-specific views from our server.
OPTION 3:
We could ask multiple controllers to handle different routes and generate pages on-the-fly (i.e. dynamically) from our server.
If we were building a traditional web application, option 3 would be the only reasonable standard. Here, pages are generated dynamically for different routes. However, with option 1, we can produce a quality Single-Page Application where the response sent to the server is an empty html page but with the built JS script that has the ability to manipulate the DOM – Yes, React! Here’s what such a response might look like:
<html>
<head>
<title>Our Website</title>
<style></style>
<script src="/link/to/any/JS/script"></script>
</head>
<body>
<h1>Hello World </h1>
<div id="root"> </div>
<script async type=”text/javascript” src="/link/to/our/transpiled/ReactSPA.js"></script>
<!--async attribute is important to ensure that the script has access to the DOM whenever it loads. This also makes the script non-blocking -->
</body>
</html>
Clearly, we’re giving all the responsibility to the generated SPA and all routing logic is handled on the client-side (See, react-router-dom). On the server side, we can introduce the concept in option 2 and tweak NodeJS route handlers to listen to another specific route for any REST API communication. If you’re familiar with NodeJS, the order in which routes are registered either by app.get() or app.post() matters.
However, using option 1, we can quickly become limited and only able to serve one Single-Page application from that server. Why? Because we have asked one controller to handle all non-API incoming routes and render one view. We also risk serving an unnecessarily bloated JS file. Users are served the complete website when all they probably wanted was just the landing page.
If we look to the option 2 though, we can tweak things a lot more and serve multiple Single-Page Applications for different routes, all from our server. This approach helps to reduce the sizes of the JS build being sent to the browser. A typical example would be a website that has a welcome page (or an introduction directory), a login page and a dashboard.
By assigning controllers for different routes, we can build SPAs uniquely for those routes. SPA for the intro page, another for the login page, and then another for the dashboard. Yes, the browser would have to load while transitioning between the three, but at least we highly increase initial render time for our website. We can also use the more secure option of cookie for authorization rather than the less secure option of storing session tokens on localStorage.
In a more advanced setting, we could have dynamic websites with different React components rendered as widgets within the dynamically generated page. Actually, this is what Facebook does.
The way to build such SPAs or components is pretty simple. Start up a react project and configure webpack to render the production-ready JS file into your preferred public static directory within the server-side repo. The <script> specified in the view can then easily load these built react components since they exist within the scope of the server-side’s public directory.
In essence, this means one repo with several client directories and one server directory where the destination of the production build files to be generated by webpack for each client project is set to the server’s public static directory. So, each client side’s directory is a project (either full SPA or simple React Component as a widget) with it’s own webpack.config and package.json file. In fact you can have two separate config files – production and development. Then, to build, you use npm ~relevant command~ for either production or development build.
You could then go ahead to host it the way you would host any NodeJS application. Because, the main application is the NodeJS - that's where the server is. Replace NodeJS with PHP and Apache/NGINX, the concept still remains the same.
I want to deploy a project (React app + Node server), but I'm new to deployment,
I wanted to know : do I need to have the React app in a Github repo and the Node server in another, or I can deploy all in one ?
Currently, I have 1 Github repository with a folder "frontend" and an other "backend",
I want to have my React app on -> nameofmyapp.herokuapp.com
and the Node server on -> api-nameofmyapp.herokuapp.com,
If someone got ideas... Thanks
While in theory that's not a problem, I would suggest maybe considering keeping things on one domian for reasons such as additional latency and connection trouble as well as path issues such as you are facing. It would seem to me that you would ideally just like to prefix the name of your app with 'backend' or similar and in such a case I would just consider setting up a sub domain on a domain which I had control ie mydomain.com and backend.mydomain.com. While developing on Heroku this model could prove to be tricky as each 'site' or app is separate and not actually intended to work together while they most certainly could. Consider setting up separate routes and an endpoint for 'backend' on your app, similar to your frontend login, then when you are finished developing your app and happy you could register your domain name and point it to your app and point a subdomain ie backend.mysite.com or login.mysite.com to your endpoint on Heroku ie mysite.com/backend. Unless you have a specific reason for separating them into their own repos with separate source control and urls, it might make debugging things much harder. Apologies if I missed your point. Most web hosting companies should allow you to register a subdomain or vanity domian free or charge because you own the primary domian. Just some considerations.
Anything is possible, you just need to understand how things are working... my advice would be that you start simple and have a single repo that contains front+back, you can then deploy that as a single Heroku app.
One app can only have a unique Heroku url, so you cannot have what you mention nameofmyapp + api-nameofmyapp hosted by a single Heroku instance, this would need to be hosted by two different instances, which means code from two repos.
Usually for a node app, you would create an /api route that is hosted by the same app, so you have your frontend served at nameofmyapp.herokuapp.com and your api at nameofmyapp.herokuapp.com/api with some sub routes, for example nameofmyapp.herokuapp.com/api/items.
You should be able to easily find tons of Node/React/Heroku tutorials on the web, just play a bit with it to experiment and build some understanding of how those are working together.
I'm new to cloud foundry, so I'm not sure, if my thoughts and plans are right. Maybe someone can explain or discuss it with me.
What I want to do:
Implement a MTA (Multitarget Application) with a a html5-module as frontend and a nodeJS-module as backend. Furthermore there should be a mongodb instance, which will be accessed from the nodejs-module. Later it should also get multitenant.
What I already did:
I implemented a simple nodejs-app and connected it to the db. Persisting and calling data with rest works already fine. I implemented a simple sapui5 app, which consumes data from the db with ajax. For now, the node startscript is in the html5 module, so it works somehow. But now I want to separate the modules.
So I created a mta-project with the two modules in webide and imported the two apps.
What I expect to do for it:
For now, I have an approuter, which is in my nodejs-module, but I can not access the webapp folder in the html5-module from here: file not found error: /home/vcap/app//. Is there a possibility to access the webapp-folder in another module over the path "/home/vcap/app/"? Or can I lookup the app-directory anywhere?
I have read, that an approuter-module (nodejs) can be needed, but I don't know exactly what it does. I think it serves the index.html file when opening the url of the whole app?
I've been using ember, node, express since 2 months ago.
I've developed an small app, now it's time to add user auth to it but I can't figure out how to do this.
There are a few questions I have:
1.- In SPA apps, where there's only index.html, I include all .js ember files. So, the user could be able to see all the app logic without auth?. How can I add the libs only when the user has been auth?
2.- What's the right way to auth in ember? I haven't seen a solution in official documentation.
3.- How the frontend communicates with the backend, what's the logic here? It's in every route?
Also I'm looking for an example or tutorial.
Thanks you!
I believe these videos target exactly your question
http://www.embercasts.com/episodes/client-side-authentication-part-1
http://www.embercasts.com/episodes/client-side-authentication-part-2
just to mention a great resource for ember tutorials http://emberwatch.com/ - it contains screencasts, books, talks.. articles - all you need to get started.
There is nothing bad about "seeing logic", you are protecting data, not code. Still, if you really want to protect your code, you can create a separate login page and require authentication for every other resource (app html, styles, scripts, etc.). But protecting EVERY resource of your app means that you can't delegate handling static files to nginx or cdn or whatnot. So, think carefully.
There are to approaches: embedded authentication and separate login page. For the first one you can use https://github.com/Vestorly/torii or https://github.com/simplabs/ember-simple-auth. If you decide to go with the second, you can just use authentication provided by your backend (passport.js, etc) and redirect to login page on failures.
Nothing special, you just write your model methods and handle possible authorisation errors. You might also want to have a user object around to use in your template and route logic.