Angular2 simplest server - node.js

I have a problem with configuring project in Angular2 so it works.
I did the tutorial, Tour of Heroes on angular site and it uses lite-server.
Now, this is perfect for me, I don't want anything complicated - simplest server, because all of my backend logic is elsewhere.
I tried to deploy it to server but it won't run. Also, on github page of lite-server it says Lightweight development only node server.
I tried express and webpack but those are extremely complicated, with advanced routing and stuff like that. I don't know how I can simply port what worked on light-server to those servers.
Is there any server like light-server which I can run in production? Or any simples seed, that isn't full-blown node server?

Related

How to 'build' a node js application?

I have a node.js application that run as a application server.
It is deployed on an Ubuntu 20.04 machine running on AWS, uses nginx as a reverse proxy and PM2 as a service starter.
Everything seems perfectly configured.
What looks strange to me, is that I have a React application, in a similar environment, but, before to move it on the server, I run build it, so creating a sort of packed and not easily human readable application.
My question is: Is there the need to do the same with a node.js application?
And, in case of positive answer, How to 'build' a node.js application?
There is no need to build a normal nodejs application.
What you mean is the use of a bundler e.g. webpack and a javascript compiler e.g. babel. To create a react application, you usually use a tool like create-react-app that sets up all this stuff for you. For react you need the compilation beacause you use the jsx syntax that browsers do not understand. In addition to that a bundler has some more advantages.
Check out this video if you want to know more about it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5IG4UmULyoA
No you don't have to build anything for node.js you just have to run the server. for client side apps you need to build and serve the Dist through web servers like apache or nginx.

Does the default Reactjs application use node.js?

This may be a dumb question, but is the default react app (created using npm create-react-app my-app) using node.js? I am confused because in my web development class at university, I had to download node.js to create react applications. However, I didn't have to do anything like creating a server or initiating a node.js file, which is described in w3school's node.js tutorial. Because of this, I found out that I don't even really know what node is used for, besides downloading packages like redux and whatnot.
create-react-app uses node.js for all of its dev tooling. Likewise, a lot of the tools you'll use in the React ecosystem (like webpack, prettier, npm), all run on top of node.js as well).
You'll most probably build your react app to a static file, in which case the production output will not require node.js, it will be html and javascript assets that can be served directly to a client.
Hope that helps! Let me know if you have other specific questions
Node.js is used for server-side while React.js is for the front-end part. So, no, you don't need Node.js.
Under development mode, yes. Create react app runs NodeJs with Webpack Dev Server to allow you get feedback when modifing files, start or stop the server.

How to deploy React.js with Node backend in IIS?

I have an application built with Create React App that I want to use Node.js as a backend to load data from a database. Basically, I want Node to load the data and then use Create React App to do stuff with it. To do so I used this tutorial: https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/how-to-make-create-react-app-work-with-a-node-backend-api-7c5c48acb1b0/. I have set up a working development environment where I have all the Create React App in a client folder, a server.js that loads the data (from MS SQL Server if that's relevant), and a proxy set in client/package.json (CRA's package.json) for the port that the node app is running on (5000 in my case). I then run yarn dev and these two servers run together and talk to each other and everything works great.
The issue is deploying. My organization uses IIS. From what I can gather Node and IIS are not the ideal combination but IIS is what we use for everything. I would like the server.js and the CRA to be in the same folder and to basically function like one app as much as possible (I know that Node will need to run its own server). I would also like a setup that can be easily changed or moved to another machine. What I've done thus far is:
Set up a single application with a client folder, which is the build for CRA, and then server.js in the root
In my react code, made API calls to http://localhost:5000 (in the development environment I could do fetch('api/somestuff') but to make it work in production I needed to do fetch('http://localhost:5000/api/somestuff') )
Installed pm2 and used it to run server.js and start the Node server
This worked, however I'm wondering whether this is the optimal way to do things. This worked on my local machine but I don't know what will happen when I put it on our production machines. Will the Node server block other applications? Will it stay running no matter what or might it crash? Ultimately this is going to be deployed in a multi-server environment where we have 2 load-balanced servers with identical code that are put through an F5 to form a single URL--will this impact anything?
I'm pretty new to programming so bear with me, I'm sorry if this question was confusingly phrased.
I suggest you install ARR to work with IIS as a reverse proxy, which can forward the HTTP request to the backend NodeJS server.
Besides, for cross-domain request forwarding in the rewrite action type, we need to install Application Request Routing, and enable the proxy functionality.
Here are two examples of applying this feature, please check it.
How to successfully run node server with IIS?
ASP.net URL Rewrite subdirectory to external URL
Feel free to let me know if there is anything I can help with.

Angular CLI Node Express.js

I come from the LAMP world. Greetings. 🖖
I'm trying to get started with the new Angular and Node.js. I already have Node and an Express server installed on my machine. Now I want to use Angular as I start building my app.
One thing I don't understand is why the Angular CLI is spinning up a server to "run the application" and why it seems we have to setup proxies and do other things to get it to work with Express.
When I think of Angular, I'm most familiar with AngularJS as part of my LAMP stack workflow. All I do here is serve it as a .js file and serve it from the same webserver that is serving everything else. Why is a client-side script getting its own server? How is it different from Express and how does it fit in with Angular Universal, which I would like to use to take advantage of SSR.
I'm not looking at how to get it all to work, I can copy and paste and read docs just fine, I'm trying to understand the fundamental concept here. The Angular docs don't explain why they are asking you to "serve the application". Is it just to test it? Why would I have two servers in development and one in production, shouldn't the dev site mirror the production site as best as possible?

Best way to implement Angular Universal

I suffer a lot in the past with angular apps and social media, so I'm glad to see that Angular Universal is being developed.
Currently I have some apps that are Angular4 as front end, and Java with Spring as backend. As far as I know there are some ways to implement Angular Universal here but they seem pretty complex (at least is what I read). So I want to know if that is in that way or not...
But anyway, my main question here, is because I saw that in order to implement Angular Universal we should have (ideally) to make the backend with nodejs, how to structure these two technologies, I mean... Should I have Angular app as a frontend app and Nodejs app as a totally different backend app (just like Java) where both are connected with web services? Or should I served Angular4 SPA direcly from Nodejs views?
And where should I place Angular Universal here?
Now that Angular CLI v1.6 is out, there's native support for building Angular Universal into your projects easily using Node.js! Essentially, you would ng build --prod to create a dist/ folder, and then create a simple node back-end and connect to your dist/ folder containing your front-end code. This article gives a great step-by-step guide: Angular server-side rendering in Node with Express Universal Engine.
When you use Angular Universal, it is going to be a single process (Operating system process) that hosts and serves your Angular pages.
In production you may have multiple such processes behind a load-balancer.
Your back-end APIs (if developed in Javascript) may be hosted in the same Node server or in separate server.
The Angular Universal setup steps are detailed here in the official documentation.
However, I had a few wasted hours to find out the following point
Webpack 3 is not compatible with ts-loader versions higher than 3.5.0. At the time of developing this, the latest version of Angular CLI is 1.7.2 which uses Webpack 3.*. Hence, while setting up Angular Universal, install ts-config#3.5.0
Finally, here I have a seed project for Angular Universal. It uses Vagrant to locally setup the development environment. Also, by tweaking an environment variable in your local host machine, you can run it in a production mode in a Docker container. The steps to run it are detailed in the readme file.
If you refer to my Dockerfile in the above Github link, its entrypoint reads:
ENTRYPOINT ["pm2-runtime","start","/home/aus/dist/server.js"]
So, you see, it's just a singe command, and your app is up and running at port 4000. Of course you can use other command line parameters to provide memory limit, port and so on.

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