I´ve tried socket.io to create a tiny chat. But now, I´m tring to do the same thing without any dependencies.
My server side seems to be OK, the problem is to render my html page when the browser doesn´t recognize any node.js code, e.g: "require" statement.
The following exception ir raised: Uncaught ReferenceError: require is not defined
I put <script src="chat2.js" type="text/javascript" charset="UTF-8"></script> on my page where "chat2.js" is my server implementation.
I´m rendering the page when I type "localhost:8080" on the webbrowser. I have no idea to makes page recognize the server side code written in the page.
Thanks!
node.js is a server side language. It's designed to run on the server powered by node. What makes this an interesting case is that the server-side language and the client-side language are both JavaScript. In some cases, the same code used on the server-side can also be used on the client side.
For instance, DOM manipulations are examples of actions that can be performed on the server-side, with a document that hasn't been sent to the client, and they're also examples of manipulations that are mostly done on the client-side.
However, you're trying to run code in the browser that can only run on the server. If the code contains modules that have dependencies on the server, then running it in the client is just not possible.
Related
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 experience with Php from school. I know that if you want to build a website in php you simply need an host and write page with the .php extension.
You might need a database for crud operations of course.
Now I was trying to shift from php to node. I just can't understand how node works. It's probably my brain that can't reach the ha ah moment.
So first of all, let's say I want to create a website with login, sign up, different pages etc.. And I want to use node as server side language. In php you just needed to write in the actual page, upload on the server and it dose what you ask..
How this is possible in node.js? Pages are in javascript and javascript is editable from the browser becouse is clientside. So how do i write node and where? I can't understand how does it work...
How to chose a good host for node? I remember websites like Aruba hosting that just gave me space to upload my php pages. How does it work for node? Are there particular host?
Sorry guys I know it is maybe a dumb question. But I need to get out of this limbo..
Lets start by splitting up your questions:
So first of all, let's say I want to create a website with login, sign up, different pages etc.. And I want to use node as server side language. In php you just needed to write in the actual page, upload on the server and it dose what you ask..
First we have to understand WHY PHP works like that. According to TechTerms:
PHP Stands for "Hypertext Preprocessor." PHP is an HTML-embedded Web
scripting language. This means PHP code can be inserted into the HTML
of a Web page. When a PHP page is accessed, the PHP code is read or
"parsed" by the server the page resides on. The output from the PHP
functions on the page are typically returned as HTML code, which can
be read by the browser. Because the PHP code is transformed into HTML
before the page is loaded, users cannot view the PHP code on a page.
This of course, is the original purpose(and still is) of PHP, embedding server-side code in HTML without returning the source and only the intended output, thus it's name Hypertext Preprocessor.
The most classical example, is trying to return a custom message inside an HTML element:
<html>
<body>
<div> Hey <b><?php echo $username ?></b>, how are you today? </div>
</body>
</html>
The output would look something like this:
Hey RavenMask, how are you today?
This is PHP. There are of course, several frameworks available that do change the way you interact with PHP, like the MVC model that Laravel uses.
But now lets move on to NodeJS.
Node is very different from PHP, but still share equal concepts, like both being interpreted, and i believe this is where your confusion started, you probably thought that the code bellow was equivalent of PHP:
<html>
<body>
<div> Hey
<script>
document.write(`<b>RavenMask</b>`)
</script>, how are you today? </div>
</body>
</html>
And in some ways, it is, for client side.
NodeJS is a server-side runtime enviroment, in a more simple-to-understand comparison, NodeJS works exactly like C, Java or C++(Node does not need a compiler like GCC thought, it works using a JIT compiler, but that's for another question).
While PHP is a language designed from the ground to run over a webserver and become easily embeeded on HTML, Node on the other hand is designed more like a traditional language, so, for achieving a result like PHP, a LOT of steps are required, just like you would need with C, C++, Java and any other language.
In Node, to achieve what PHP does, you would need:
Creating an HTTP Server.
Creating an templating engine to mimic what PHP does inside HTML.
Luckily for us, all those steps have been already implemented in battle tested modules(and even in the native NodeJS default library!), so, the most barebones example that you can get is this:
const http = require('http')
// Here you're creating the HTTP server, like Apache
const server = http.createServer((request, response) => {
const username = 'RavenMask'
// Abuse templating strings!
// Respose.end means: Give this back to the client and end the cicle of the request
response.end(`
<html>
<body>
<div> Hey <b>${username}</b>, how are you today? </div>
</body>
</html>
`)
})
// Here is where you create the event loop for the HTTP server
server.listen(3000, (err) => {
if (err) {
return console.log('something bad happened', err)
}
console.log(`server is listening`)
})
Go on, save this file as index.js and on your terminal type:
node index.js
Then go to localhost:3000 on your browser and voilá!
This of course, is NOT production ready, so be careful.
To wrap it up, if you're still interested in Node, the steps you need to take are:
Understand how Node works, including its architecture and the most important, the event loop.
Use and abuse frameworks and modules. The example i gave you above, if you tried to expand it, would cause a lot of suffering and pain due the way it's designed, but it's fine so you can learn. Using frameworks and modules, you get battle-tested, community contributed code that can make your life easier, safer and production-ready, one good example, is creating an HTTP server with the Fastify Framework.
Don't give up: Learning a different language sure is hard, but can give you a lot of opportunities on the market and you can learn a LOT from looking things from a different angle, you usually end up acknowledging mistakes you do on another languages by looking on how things work from another.
I'm writing my first Node/React/Express/Next app.
I'm uncertain how to execute server side code when a request comes in.
When there's a request, I need to get some data off the server disk. I'm trying to do this from a javascript file in my pages directory, but the 'fs' module is not accessible from here. I guess that's because the browser must be executing the code (which is confusing for me because I thought next.js meant the server was processing the code and exporting the html back).
I've done much googling about this problem and can't seem to find an answer. Which is bizarre, because this must be one of the most basic requirements of a web app. Maybe the solution is so basic and I'm just overlooking the obvious?
Can anyone provide a brief explanation or pointers in the right direction on how to do server-side processing (eg reading a file from the servers disk) from a /pages/xxx.js file in a React/Express/Next app? Or in other words, how or where do I access the 'fs' module?
The error I get is "ModuleNotFoundError: Module not found: Error: Can't resolve 'fs' in /pages
thanks
Your next.js app is split in two pieces, the part running on the client and server (rendering the pages to HTML) and the part running only on the server (finding the pages and exposing them over HTTP).
What you want to do is possible only on the server and usually done in the realm of express, the routing framework. Next.js is designed to make it easy to create SPAs that do not need a backend but want server-side rendering.
However it does allow modifying the server-only component, if you need to. The documentation for that can be found in the "Custom Server and Routing" section of the docs.
You can then add API routes that the front-end can call to request data form the backend, e.g. by returing JSON that the app can store in the React state.
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