I am trying to understand Ionic development for mobile (with Capacitor), and something is off. When I develop Electron desktop app, I have a division for local working backend service and frontend of my choice.
The case is, Ionic apparently doesn't give such option. Of course, I can create online backend on Fireship or Google Cloud, but it would be great to build such thing on mobile. Am I not mistaken? Maybe I am missing something?
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I recently started using react with a node server as a backend. I'm having problems to understand how to deploy such an app. I'm a beginner with ionic and deploying websites (or rather web based mobile apps) so I apologize if this is an easy/stupid question.
I searched a lot about this but my brain is still struggling to understand the deployment process. As I understand, any website have generally two parts, the frontend built with HTML/CSS/JS and the backend built with nodejs (in my case). If I want to run the app, I need to type npm start in the terminal right? so I'm only running the node server actually, where it will serve the HTML pages (static pages) depending on which url endpoint I wrote, right?
So deploying this is "easy" by copying the static files into a remote server and just run the nodeJs server to serve pages depending on the request, right. Therefore, is the start command here npm start, which will start the whole app.
I'm now using the ionic framework with react syntax and nodejs in the backend. There is a special command to run the ionic app (frontend), which is ionic serve. So if I run this the frontend will show up in the browser. Furthermore, I need to run the node server with npm start to handle requests. Therefore, to start my app, I need the ionic serve and npm start commands. How can this be deployed?
After some research, I read that I need to deploy the ionic app (frontend) and the backend separately. For example the ionic app would be a webapp and the server also a separate webapp (since I'm using MS Azure). The communication between them can be over rest API or web sockets as I understand. Is this the right approach to do this or there is a better/more clear way?
deploying two apps would mean that I need to pay for two apps on azure. Is there a way to minimize costs and have a functional app?
PS: generally, I'm having problems to understand the deployment process. I understand basically how the web works and I can build website on my machine but I'm not confident about my skills when it comes to deployment. Surprisingly, there is not much on the internet about it. Can someone please recommend articles, books or ideally videos that explain this process. Thank you in advance.
here is how you deploy ionic apps as pwa - https://ionicframework.com/docs/react/pwa
if you are using a node backend, the you would start the server same as you would normally, If I am understanding the question
Though your question is not specific to a particular issue but highlights a wide variety of issues, i will still try to explain it.
Ionic is primarily used for creating HYBRID/WEB MOBILE APPLICATIONS. Although you can deploy the code as a website too, but you will not be able to get any benefit out of using ionic for a website only and not using react as a standalone framework.
Be clear on your requirement, your question talks about website and web based mobile apps. Deploying a website and a hybrid mobile application is not one and the same thing. Websites are hosted on servers, mobile apps are deployed in app stores.
If you are not going to deploy to any mobile platform, i suggest you drop ionic and build your website with react.
Now coming to Ionic mobile apps, this is the flow
Create Ionic Project -> Build project for iOS/Android platform -> Deploy these apps to respective app stores
You will not host your Ionic mobile code on any hosting provider.
Your node.js backend code gets hosted on a hosting service. The endpoint URL will change to your hosted servers IP address.
Read about following topics first
What are hybrid mobile applications
What is Ionic
How to build mobile apps using Ionic
Publishing Mobile Applications
Deploying node.js to a cloud host
I discovered ionic this week and I'm really considering using it at work.
Basically, my goal is to build an app that will work on android and Ios, where the needed functionality is to connect to the cloud over web socket and pull data from the cloud and show it on my phone. Maybe later I'll eventually need to consider using login but not for now at least.
Normally, if I'm building a web app. I ll use nodejs to pull the data from the cloud and expose it to the frontend. I ll write all code together and I ll host my app in Heroku or something where the entry point is my nodejs server right? So that my server needs to start and it will take care of the rest.
This is a bit confusing in ionic since I need to start the app with ionic serve, but somehow I also need to start my nodejs server too right? So I assume I can't write the server-side code inside the ionic app or am I wrong?
There is not much about this on the internet but I did some research and I guess that I should deploy (host) my nodejs server in the cloud (maybe using Heroku) and then connect to the server from my mobile app over the socket. Is this the right/only way to do this? are there any security issues with this method?
I find ionic great but I'm not sure if I should use it at work. Sincerely, this use case of using a backend server with ionic made me confused.
Ionic looks ideal for building cross-platform apps that does not need server-side scripting, but how complex can it be if I want to integrate some server-side code in my app? especially as I said I'm going to use some login forms in the future to extend the functionality of my app.
PS: I'm using ionic 6.10.1 and specifically I'm interested in using ionic with react not with angular.
After some search, I discovered that it isn't possible to deploy the frontend and backend code together. Therefore the trick is to deploy the nodejs server separate from the frontend.
Precisely, if it is a web app, then you should deploy the nodejs server in a separate host from the frontend. Then by starting the frontend app, you can communicate with the running nodejs server via socket or REST API.
Hope this helps someone in the future :)
I have developed an application which is using REACT for front end and ExpressJS(framework for nodejs) for back-end. Code is running properly in my local machine.
I have no idea about hosting this application so that other people can use it.
Note: Both REACT project and Node project must be running parallel to make this application work
Appreciate your help !!
You can use this one https://www.heroku.com
It's a popular platform. It's free for a limited amount of space, so it's good to try out applications. It's pretty easy to use, you can even auto-deploy your app every time you push it to github repo, if you have one.
I am working on a food purchase web app. The app has already been launched on mobile (Android). Now we want to build a web version.
The backend of this app was built using Node, Angular and Firebase.
I would like to know if I can only use Angular 2 (without Node.js) for the web application. What the web app will basically do is to:
User authentication
Consume Backend API
Checkout, after purchase
My major concern is, do I need Node.js for anything? Or is Angular 2 just enough for my frontend development and deployment?
Angular is your front end.
Nodejs is your backend.
Firebase is a cloud backend that I assume you're handling your user Authentication in....it's easier than DIY if you aren't backend savvy.
Depending on what Node is doing, then you might be able to remove node and rely entirely on Firebase(big maybe...).....I suggest not touching anything becuase you clearly aren't a backend engineer. Node is probably hosting your app's API and/or connecting to your database.
Yes, you can switch to a different backend from node like PHP or .Net and it will work with Angular2. You will need some sort of backend(Angular2 is 100% front End).
I want to develop an hybrid cross platform app that creates a socket connection to given Ip.
I have achieved it using webTCP module in node.js by running node from cmd to start the server.
Now I want to pack this in to an app using Phonegap. But my question is how do I run node(to start server) in mobile through the app created using phonegap.
Do we need to install node in mobile. If so how can I do that?
Thanx in advance.
nodejs isn't done (yet) to run on Android. NodeJs is a server thing so it should run on your server to run tour backend.
In order to do what you want to do you will have to redesign your architecture.
Indeed, Cordova/PhoneGap is a little server (actually it's is a WebView but you can approximate it to a static content delevery server). So you will have to made your cordova app talk to your node-server.
1. CORS
Cordova-app <- INTERNET -> Node-server
The first thing to do is to enable CORS, for nodejs and whitelist the adress of your node-server in cordova
2. let's talk
Now you can start talking to your server with your cordova app, there is many ways to do that :
xhr/Ajax request
Pur WebSocket (you will need to enable JAVA-WebSocket)
Socketio
3. being more powerful
You will need more powerful feature between your app and your server side. In order to do that, you could need some WebApp framework. Indeed, they automate for you the connection between the server and your application and offer you a cool and easy environment to do great apps. If you want to know more about it, you could look at
BackBone
Marionette
AngularJs
Hope that help.