Kickstarting Your Full-Stack Journey with React, Vite, and Express

In today’s fast-paced digital world, building responsive, scalable, and secure web applications is more crucial than ever. The combination of React, Vite, and Express offers a robust foundation for developing full-stack applications. This article serves as your guide to setting up a React application with an Express backend, highlighting the simplicity and efficiency of using Vite for your development setup.

Why React, Vite, and Express?

React is a declarative, efficient, and flexible JavaScript library for building user interfaces. It enables developers to create large web applications that can change data, without reloading the page.

Vite is a build tool that significantly improves the frontend development experience. It offers out-of-the-box support for ES modules, hot module replacement (HMR), and lightning-fast server start-up.

Express is a minimal and flexible Node.js web application framework, providing a robust set of features to develop web and mobile applications. It facilitates the rapid development of Node-based web applications.

Setting Up the Project

  1. Initial Setup: Begin by creating a new directory for your project and initializing a Node.js project within it:
mkdir my-fullstack-app && cd my-fullstack-app
npm init -y
  1. Setting Up the Frontend with React and Vite:
    • Install Vite globally (if you haven’t already) and create a new React project:
npm install -g create-vite
create-vite frontend --template react
cd frontend
npm install
  • Start the Vite development server to see your React app in action:

npm run dev

At this point, you can navigate to http://localhost:3000 to see your React app running.

  1. Integrating the Express Backend:
    • Navigate back to the root of your project and create a new directory for your backend:
cd ..
mkdir backend && cd backend
npm init -y
  • Install Express and set up a basic server:

npm install express

Create a file named server.js in the backend directory with the following content to define a simple Express server:

const express = require('express');
const app = express();
const PORT = process.env.PORT || 5000;

app.get('/api', (req, res) => {
  res.json({ message: "Hello from Express!" });
});

app.listen(PORT, () => {
  console.log(`Server is running on http://localhost:${PORT}`);
});
  • Start your Express server:

node server.js

Your Express server is now running on http://localhost:5000. You can test the /api route using a tool like Postman or by navigating to http://localhost:5000/api in your browser.

Connecting React with Express

To enable your React app to communicate with the Express backend, you’ll need to set up a proxy. Vite makes this process straightforward.

  1. Configure the Proxy in Vite: Navigate to your frontend directory and open the vite.config.js file. Add a server proxy configuration to redirect API calls to your Express backend:
export default defineConfig({
  plugins: [react()],
  server: {
    proxy: {
      '/api': 'http://localhost:5000'
    }
  }
});
  1. Fetching Data from the Express Backend: In your React app, you can now fetch data from the Express server by creating a simple component that makes an API call to /api:
import React, { useEffect, useState } from 'react';

function App() {
  const [message, setMessage] = useState('');

  useEffect(() => {
    fetch('/api')
      .then(response => response.json())
      .then(data => setMessage(data.message));
  }, []);

  return <div>{message}</div>;
}

export default App;

Conclusion

You’ve successfully set up a full-stack application using React, Vite, and Express. This setup not only demonstrates the ease of getting started with these powerful technologies but also lays the foundation for building more complex features, including authentication, database integration, and state management.

In the next articles, we will delve into integrating third-party SAML authentication and securing our API routes. Stay tuned to expand your full-stack development skills further.

Happy coding!

Back to Top