A great place to start your isomorphic React applications
With ES6/7 support and a shared client/server routing table
It might seem like I'm striving for full buzzword compliance. In fact, I just want a development environment in which I can be productive and happy. I'm well on the road to getting there, and I want to share that with you. If you make it better, please do share!
You get the full benefits of React on the client side while still having the performance and SEO benefits of server-side rendering. You also get maintainability benefits by reducing the overall size of your code base, and if you adhere to the React philosophy you likely design a better application as well.
Webpack is the all-singing all-dancing asset bundler, though it can be quite daunting to understand. Much of the hard work has already been done for you here, so you can code from the beginning while watching your JSX and CSS changes reflected in the browser with no reloads (not even an automatic reload!)
Using the fabulous 6to5 transpiler on the server and client, you can write generators,
use the new class syntax, arrow functions, and more. Using the module.extensions API
obviates the need for any compilation step in Node, too. Additionally, if you're too
impatient to await, I've also packaged up versions of node-jsx and jsx-loader which
allow you to use ES7 async functions.
Write your web application routes once, and use the excellent features available with React Router.
Ships with convenient node-inspector support. Also, check out the React DevTools for Chrome if you haven't tried them yet.
To make everything work, this assumes you have nginx in $PATH. To install you have
several options although no mention is made of Mac OS X.
I personally install mine with homebrew.
Beyond that, all the dependencies are just an npm install away.
There are 3 processes you need to run. For maximum debuggability, I generally run them each in a different tab / tmux pane. The separate invocations are:
npm run-script nginx
npm run-script webpack
npm start
If you just want to run everything in one shell, you can:
npm run-script everything
Once you've got it all running, visit http://localhost:3000
If your application is running in the same environment as your web browser (i.e., not on a VM or a remote host), you can debug your server using node-inspector:
npm run-script debug
This will launch your default browser pointed at the node-inspector interface for the server process.
If it's not on your local computer, you still run the server but less conveniently:
node_modules/.bin/node-inspector server/server.js
Then you'll need to hit port 5858 on the remote server/VM, which may or may not be available depending on firewalls.