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create-react-app with a Node server on Heroku

A minimal example of using a Node backend (server for API, proxy, & routing) with a React frontend.

To deploy a frontend-only React app, use the static-site optimized
▶️ create-react-app-buildpack

⤵️ Switching from create-react-app-buildpack?

Design Points

A combo of two npm projects, the backend server and the frontend UI. So there are two package.json configs and thereforce two places to run npm commands:

  1. Node server: ./package.json
  2. React UI: react-ui/package.json
    • generated by create-react-app
    • deployed via build hooks in the Node server's ./package.json
      • module cache configured by cacheDirectories
      • bundling via heroku-postbuild hook

Includes a minimal Node Cluster implementation to parallelize the single-threaded Node process across the available CPU cores.

Demo

Demo deployment: example API call from the React UI is fetched with a relative URL that is served by an Express handler in the Node server.

Deploy to Heroku

git clone https://github.com/mars/heroku-cra-node.git
cd heroku-cra-node/
heroku create
git push heroku master

This deployment will automatically:

  • detect Node buildpack
  • build the app with
    • npm install for the Node server
    • heroku-postbuild for create-react-app
  • launch the web process with npm start
    • serves ../react-ui/build/ as static files
    • customize by adding API, proxy, or route handlers/redirectors

⚠️ Using npm 5’s new package-lock.json? We resolved a compatibility issue. See PR for more details.

👓 More about deploying to Heroku.

Switching from create-react-app-buildpack

If an app was previously deployed with create-react-app-buildpack, then a few steps are required to migrate the app to this architecture:

  1. Remove create-react-app-buildpack from the app; heroku/nodejs buildpack will be automatically activated

    heroku buildpacks:clear

  2. Move the root React app files (including dotfiles) into a react-ui/ subdirectory

    mkdir react-ui
git mv -k [!react-ui]* react-ui/
mv node_modules react-ui/

# If you see "fatal: Not a git repository", then fix that error
mv react-ui/.git ./

    ⚠️ Some folks have reported problems with these commands. Sorry if they do not work for you, know that the point is to move everything in the repo into the react-ui/ subdirectory. Except for .git/ which should remain at the root level. 

  3. Create a root package.json, server/, & .gitignore modeled after the code in this repo

  4. Commit and deploy ♻️

    git add -A
git commit -m 'Migrate from create-react-app-buildpack to Node server'
git push heroku master

Local Development

Because this app is made of two npm projects, there are two places to run npm commands:

  1. Node API server at the root ./
  2. React UI in react-ui/ directory.

Run the API server

In a terminal:

# Initial setup
npm install

# Start the server
npm start

Install new npm packages for Node

npm install package-name --save

Run the React UI

The React app is configured to proxy backend requests to the local Node server. (See "proxy" config)

In a separate terminal from the API server, start the UI:

# Always change directory, first
cd react-ui/

# Initial setup
npm install

# Start the server
npm start

Install new npm packages for React UI

# Always change directory, first
cd react-ui/

npm install package-name --save