MERN stack starter

The MERN stack starter demonstrates a working application that uses a React frontend, with a backend build with ExpressJS and MongoDB. It shows how the client can make client HTTP requests and maintain persistant sessions.

Getting Started

To run a development environment, you can use the start-dev command. This will start up a development web server on port 3000, and a nodemon-watched API server on port 3100. These development servers will automatically reload if changes are made to the source.

• Install dependencies with:

  yarn
  

• Install MongoDB

• Start the development environment:

  yarn start-dev
  

Docker Compose

If you use Docker and Docker Compose, you can start the entire project with:

docker-compose up

Configuration (Optional)

By default, the server will expect to connect to a MongoDB instance running on localhost:27017. However, you can customize the environment to use different values for the MongoDB host. To do that, you can create a .env file for specifying credential information for MongoDB.

Create a new file called .env, with the following YAML:

MONGO_URL=mongodb://localhost:27017/comments
MONGO_USER=username
MONGO_PASSWORD=password

or instead, you can use the equivalent JSON:

{
  "mongo": {
    "url": "mongodb://localhost:27017/comments",
    "user": "username",
    "password": "password"
  }
}

Where the URL, username, and password are set to your preferences.

Docker Development run

If you would like to run the development tools inside of a docker container, you can set up a local Docker development environment by building the image:

docker build -f Dockerfile-tools -t rfdickerson/mern-example .

And running the image:

docker run -v ${PWD}:/usr/app -p 3000:3100 -t rfdickerson/mern-example

Dependencies

• axios - promise-based HTTP client
• foreman - a Procfile-based application utility
• mongoose - mongodb object modelling
• express - minimalist Node.js framework
• react - JS library for building user interfaces