React server with Node and Proxy API requests - node.js

Question

I'm relatively new to React, and trying to deploy an application to an Openshift environment. The app consists of a React JS front-end which makes API calls to a nodejs back end restful api. That's the idea at least.
Most of the ways I've found suggest using docker, but I have no idea where to start with that. The create-react-app documentations gives an example of an Node/Express server to render the index.html, which I am much more familiar with and have got working, but I can't seem to set a proxy to route the api calls to the back-end.
I initially tried setting the proxy in the package.json, but that didn't work. I then found express-http-proxy which looked promising, but can't get it to work.
My front end server looks like this:
const express = require('express');
const path = require('path');
const app = express();
const proxy = require('express-http-proxy');
const PORT = process.env.OPENSHIFT_NODEJS_PORT || 8080;
const API_PROXY_URL = process.env.APIURL
app.use(express.static(path.join(__dirname)));
app.use('/api', proxy(API_PROXY_URL));
app.get('/*', (req, res) => {
res.sendFile(path.join(__dirname, 'index.html'));
});
app.listen(PORT, () => {
console.log(`Server Started on port ${PORT}`);
console.log(`Proxy in use of ${API_PROXY_URL}`);
});
I have a generic api function which is making the calls using axios:
export function apiCall(method, path, data) {
return new Promise((resolve, reject) => {
return axios[method.toLowerCase()](path, data)
.then(res => {
return resolve(res.data);
})
.catch(err => {
return reject(err.response.data.error);
});
});
}
For example, my when I try and sign in it is trying to do a post call to <<REACTURL>>/api/auth/signin when I want it to send to <<APIURL>>/api/auth/signin.
I feel I'm missing something really obvious.

Answer 1

I couldn't get this to work as I wanted to ended up declaring the full URL in the API request to get it working. Not pretty, but does the job:
export function apiCall(method, path, data) {
let url = <<APIURL>> + path
return new Promise((resolve, reject) => {
return axios[method.toLowerCase()](url, data)
.then(res => {
return resolve(res.data);
})
.catch(err => {
return reject(err.response.data.error);
});
});
}