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 have read on couple of articles that when building a website with react either php or nodeJS or something else is required to have a backend to retrieve data and server side rendering
I can manage data retrieving on react without any backend server (based on my experience with react-native).
I am not sure if server-side rendering is necessary for react?
What are the pros/cons, can the website work without server-side rendering?
Something has to render the original page being served for React. However, after that, there's nothing stopping you from doing everything else client side. There are tons of articles out there discussing the benefits and drawbacks of doing full CSR (Client Side Rendering) or full SSR (Server Side Rendering). However, I've found that most agree that there's a middle ground that meets the best of both worlds.
However, if your app is relatively small and unencumbered, going full CSR as you're indicating you want to will probably have little or no impact.
Server side rendering will give you better search engine results and previewing.
You can still use React with server side rendering with a framework like Nextjs. You may just want to initially render on the server side and from then on in use client side rendering.
Really depends on what you're planning to build. Firebase has security permissions for you to experiment to filter out what type of traffic you'd want. However if you are solely dependent on the client then there would be severe consequences for edge cases. What if there was an app breaking bug and someone abuses it, what if someone has an older version of your app and calls bad code? Utilizing nodeJs to call your business side logic is a very important layer of protection since you have one codebase that handles all of this incoming traffic.
So an example of business-side logic that shouldn't be on the client's system:
What if you had an important counter say $ dollars that you've spent on that website and it goes into the database once and feeds you that information and you'd save that into local storage until the end of the session. Are there consequences to this if you had multiple instances (hint: they might not all of the same $ amount if you've manipulated that data on the client's side) ? This would be an example of why you'd definitely want to have a nodeJS backend for your React application.
I've recently dived into React+Flux on the front-end, and I love it! But I want to also be able to use React on the back-end to avoid having to duplicate views and rendering logic.
I've seen that React supports server-side rendering if you use Node, but I do not use Node for my back-end logic.
So I'm wondering, can I set up a daemon written in Node that just renders HTML based on the data it receives and the root React component?
What I have in mind is to have my back-end application call this daemon with data already prepared (so that domain logic can live on my main back-end application), get HTML, and return that to the front-end.
Is this approach feasible? Has this been done before? I'd love some feedback!
I see that it's been a month and there are still no comments, I will share some of my understandings.
We can use this setup:
An API written in PHP or something similar that serves data.
Isomorphic React components - render on the server, attach event listeners on the client.
Server-side (Node) - the React component uses AJAX calls to get its props from the API and embeds them into a <script id="props" /> tag in the HTML as a JSON string.
Client-side - the component checks the script tag for props. If there is data, then it uses that to skip the re-rendering; if not (due to a server error or something), it can still use AJAX to get its props.
The main idea is that the website is isomorphic (server and client share the same code), so your existing front-end can be easily adapted to this setup.
A good place to start is a simple example about isomorphic React components. This tutorial can also provide an overview to this subject.
I'm building a web application using node.js, this is my first time working with node. I'm using express framework and I have a question about client side rendering.
All the tutorials that I have found online talk about express and server side rendering. They talk about how you can use jade the express templating engine, to serve rendered templates as reponse to your web application.
My application is going to be client heavy and most of the rendering will be done client side. I want to call server to just get plain JSON response and then render it client side, so server side rendering is not of much use.
In this case, is express a right choice? I really like the way I can write APIS in express but I'm concerned about how to serve my application. If I don't want to use the server side rendering it would mean that I would have to serve static HTML at the first call which seems weird to me.
You might want to try Emberjs if you want most of the work done on the client side. But still, you need to send the data to the client so one way is to build your app totally on the client side just by sending a plain html and working your way up there. You can also precompile jade
What you are describing sounds like you are searching for an javascript MVC(or other) solution.
There are a lot of possibilities. Take the right tools for the right job.
Try the following link to get an nice overview of what is possible.
Helping you select an MV* framework
I understand that Express resides on the server and Angular resides on the client but, as far as I know, Angular can do everything that Express can do which is
routing
interacting with the database
It kind of seems like maybe Express is needed in order for an AngularJS app to be served by Node.js but I'm not sure.
So what are the benefits to adding Express to an AngularJS app?
There are things which should be done server side (i.e. Express, not Angular), most notably user input validation - Angular, as it's client side, can be tampered.
Also, if you'll ever want to offer access type other than web app (i.e. mobile app), you'll probably need an API anyway - Express can do this, Angular don't.
Finally, database access - usually Angular app will need to connect to some kind of backend to perform CRUD operations. You'll either go with hosted DB like Firebase, or you'll end up using your own database. Latter scenario is more popular and you'll need Express (or similar) for that.
Express and AngularJS do not mutually exclude one another, they serve different purpose - in fact it's perfectly fine to use both - express for all your serverside logic, and Angular for client side logic.
Express can be used to host the APIs for AngularJS's service/factory to consume. You can consider AngularJS as MVC and the API on Express as SOA.
There is lot of stuff that one wants to control from server. And that is the place where the server side frameworks come into picture.
An web app is not just some html pages linked together. There are lot of other things that needs to be implemented
Model validation.
Keeping model consistent. Remember multiple users can access the same model at any give time and even change it.
Controlling resource access.
Triggering workflows.
Business Logic.
and other such thing require a server framework. So as mentioned earlier the client side frameworks like AngularJS complement server side frameworks.