This is the most basic question.
In every online example I see, to get a website running with NodeJS and React two seperate programs/servers are created. One runs on port 3000 and the other on 3001. Is this necessary?
If react is a frontend engine why does it have to run on a port or a server?
Im confused as to why they always use create-react-app which may be running on its own server im not sure.
I would like to create app.js import 'express' to handle requests and also import React on the same file, but I run into compilation errors, will this approach work?
Is this necessary?
No, this isn't ever necessary and is only typically done in development.
If react is a frontend engine why does it have to run on a port or a server?
Webpack (the thing typically bundling your React code for browser usage, similar tools are vite/snowpack) creates a server for live updates and errors so changes in your React automatically propagate to the UI.
This is only done during development and not in production. It's a convenience feature while developing the code.
I would like to create app.js import 'express' to handle requests and also import React on the same file, but I run into compilation errors, will this approach work?
Frontend code usually has a build step where you run npm run build which runs webpack --production over your code (or esbuild or other similar tools). After this point all your frontend code is typically static files (.js .html .css etc) from which point you just serve them from static file storage (usually a CDN for faster load times in different geographies).
Integrating a server (say in Python or Java) with CRA can be done in two ways: "CRA first" or "Other server first"
By CRA-first I mean that the main serving component is the React server, hence serve the React application with yarn start and call a server api configured in package.json's proxy setting. This is easy and clearly explained in Create React App documentation.
By "Other server first" I mean that you serve everything (HTML etc) with a web framework of your choice but that the served HTML also loads the React application. The documentation explains how to deploy in such situation (basically yarn build the app and normally load the generated JavaScript file(s) from your HTML) but not how to do this in development.
So, how can I serve with an arbitrary server my possibly dynamic HTML and in such HTML reference the deployment JavaScript that CRA keeps updated?
It is explained in the documentation in the section Static Server https://facebook.github.io/create-react-app/docs/deployment#static-server
You just build yarn build and serve it using serve -s build 4000. Or you can use Apache/Nginx or whatever you want instead of serve. But you need to rebuild your application every time you make changes and restart the server. This way you won't get hot reload etc. You need Webpack server (CRA integrates it in the background) for that.
I have used vue-cli to scaffolding an vue app and now I want to setup a different web server rather then webpack-dev-server because I want a separate configuration file where I can configure the server like node express which I can use for production deployment.
Please suggest is there any way to configure the new server. Thanks
For development you should continue using webpack dev server (which is express).
For deployment you can use anything you want, just run:
npm run build
This will generate bundled javascript files, which you can then deploy anywhere.
I can build and serve an Angular 5 project with ng serve and view it in my browser. I'd like to move the files onto a docker container because my final app needs to have a php backend.
When I move the same file system that runs with ng serve to a docker build and try to navigate to it, I receive a server error.
I know the container works properly because I can serve PHP files to the browser at the respective localhost port without any issues. So it needs to be something with Angular that is causing the error.
I've noticed that the ng new angular-tour-of-heroes project doesn't have an index.html in the root project directory. When I move the one in the src/ folder to the root, I still get nothing in the browser.
How can I serve an Angular app using Docker instead of ng serve?
This answer will be two parts since it sounds like you may not be familiar with the build process.
Building
This is more general to most JavaScript frameworks. There is usually a "build" process that will produce the static web application in some way that it can be served by a web server.
In the case of Angular, it is ng build. You can learn more about the command at https://github.com/angular/angular-cli/wiki/build. The ng build command would create a dist directory in your project where the built HTML, CSS< and JavaScript lives. The files in this directory are what you would push to your web server to serve.
Docker
Now that we understand how to get the source of the web application to serve, we want to run it as a container. Based on your question, I am assuming that you already have a Docker image with a web server. In this case, you could copy the dist folder to the same location as the existing Dockerfile that builds your web server and add a line to your Dockerfile such as:
COPY dist/* /my/webserver/root
If you can provide more information about your existing image, Dockerfile, and environment I could provide a better example of building and producing the Angular application to the final web server image.
Though, you don't necessarily need to serve the Angular application from your PHP application. If your Angular application is connecting to the PHP application they could still be separate Docker images and containers that are linked together.
I've made my first Angular2 application, while using ng servefor hosting. Now I've to add some backend(because I need some small server logic).
I've found this who basically explain me how to host an angular 2 app on nodeJs. But ng serve was doing a lot of things, checking the changes, bundling the differents JS/CSS files, injecting angular into my template, getting my dependencies.
I cannot just "generate" angular web site and then, since I've to update the angular part to get the data from the web api and work with it.
So what should I do to switch from ng serve to an nodeJS?
EDIT:
Viewing the answer, I must not have been clear enough.
My angular JS is not an application that will on client ONLY, I've done some part of it(navigation, some form, ...) but now I need to host a server with web service and websocket to continue the work. It's not about deploying this to a productive server. It's about to moving to an environnement that allow me to work on the server and the client side.
I think I finally understood your question:
Instead of using the devserver bundled with angular-cli (ng serve), you want to use your own Node.js-powered server.
Also, you DON'T WANT TO STATICALLY BUILD your app (ng build). You want to serve the live build (which has to be generated automatically by the server).
Here's how you can do it:
1) Watch, transpile, bundle...
Webpack is perfect for that.
Create a webpack config file with the right settings for an Angular app. Here's an example from angular2-webpack-starter: webpack.dev.js.
The example is bit verbose. Just keep in mind the config file is where you tell webpack how to handle .ts files, what bundle(s) it should generate, etc.
2) Serve the bundle(s) generated by webpack with a Node.js server
I see two options, depending on how much control you want:
2a. Use webpack-dev-server (not a lot of control)
webpack-dev-server --config config/webpack.dev.js --watch src/
You can see that the webpack-dev-server uses the config file previously mentioned.
Again, you can see an example of the full command to run in angular2-webpack-starter's package.json file.
2b. Create your own server (a lot of control)
You could create a Node.js/Express server using the webpack-dev-middleware, to which you would feed the config file created in step #1.
The middleware is the magic link that will let you serve the files emitted from webpack over the Express server.
Example of a Node.js/Express server which uses the webpack-dev-middleware: srcServer.js.
Does that answer your question?
I know this is an old question but I am just having this same concern and I found ngserve proxy option useful. In development you can run node on another port then calls to /api get redirected through to node.js.
https://github.com/angular/angular-cli/blob/master/docs/documentation/stories/proxy.md
package.json gets:
"start": "ng serve --proxy-config proxy.conf.json",
then make a proxy.conf.json file like this
{
"/api": {
"target": "http://localhost:3000",
"secure": false,
"pathRewrite": {
"^/api": ""
}
}
}
run ng build --prod to build your application.
After building the application, you will find your final dist code in dist directory.
Now, use this code in your server.js file in Node.js.
(function() {
const express = require("express");
const app = express();
app.use(express.static(__dirname + "/dist"));
app.listen(80);
console.log("port" + 80);
})();
I'm not sure if this is still relevant, but this might help others get a quick start:
Run your NodeJS server part e.g. like this
nodemon server.js
Open 2nd terminal (in VSCode Ctrl+Shift`) and start client part build & watch
ng build --watch
They will continue to work in parallel, each doing it's own job. This is not exactly the same as ng serve, e.g. this will not reflect your changes immediately inside the page, you still have to hit F5 (which you most probably did anyway before Angular). But this is fast, free and much easier than becoming web-pack guru. And you are still able to switch between terminals to check for any output / errors.
Angular app is a HTML 5 app. So you just need to serve it as a static file in NoeJs.
How
Build your app
ng build --prod
This command will create a folder named dist. The folder content is your HTML app.
Serving your app
Just serve it with your NodeJs app pointing to the index.html file.
ng serve is only for development. It is not intended as a production web server.
ng build --prod --aot --no-sourcemap will bundle your application ready for production and place it in your dist/ directory.
If you want to use Node.js you can use Express with the static file middleware. You will probably also want a RewriteRule middleware to support serverside HTML5 Pushstate.
In reality you don't need NodeJS to serve your built site as it will just be flat files. Nginx, Apache or IIS with rewrite rules to support HTML5 Pushstate will be enough.