Get Started with Building and Deploying Your Own ChatGPT using React 19 for Free | Introduction to Setting Up Your Backend Server

In this tutorial, we will be using React 19 to build and deploy our own chatbot using OpenAI’s GPT-3 API. We will also be creating our own backend server to handle requests to the API.

Creating a backend server is an essential step when building applications that interact with external APIs like GPT-3. This server will handle all the requests to the API, process the responses, and communicate with our front-end application.

To get started, make sure you have Node.js installed on your machine. You can download the latest version from the official Node.js website.

Step 1: Set up a new Node.js project

First, create a new directory for your project and navigate to it in your terminal. Run the following command to initialize a new Node.js project:

npm init -y

This will create a package.json file in your project directory with default values.

Next, install the necessary dependencies for your backend server. In this tutorial, we will be using Express.js as our server framework and Axios for making HTTP requests to the GPT-3 API. Run the following command to install these dependencies:

npm install express axios

Step 2: Set up your backend server

Create a new JavaScript file (e.g., server.js) in your project directory. This file will contain the code for your backend server.

const express = require('express');
const axios = require('axios');

const app = express();
const port = 3001;

app.use(express.json());

app.post('/ask', async (req, res) => {
  const { prompt } = req.body;

  try {
    const response = await axios.post('https://api.openai.com/v1/engines/davinci/completions', {
      prompt,
      max_tokens: 150
    }, {
      headers: {
        'Content-Type': 'application/json',
        'Authorization': 'Bearer YOUR_API_KEY' // Replace with your API key
      }
    });

    res.json(response.data.choices[0].text);
  } catch (error) {
    console.error(error);
    res.status(500).send('An error occurred');
  }
});

app.listen(port, () => {
  console.log(`Server is running on http://localhost:${port}`);
});

Replace ‘YOUR_API_KEY’ with your actual API key from OpenAI’s platform. Make sure to keep this key secure and never expose it publicly.

This code sets up a basic Express server with a single POST endpoint (/ask) that accepts a prompt in the request body, sends it to the GPT-3 API, and returns the generated text as a response.

Step 3: Start your server

To start your backend server, run the following command in your terminal:

node server.js

This will start your server on port 3001. You can now make requests to the /ask endpoint from your front-end application to interact with the GPT-3 API.

In the next part of this tutorial, we will integrate this backend server with our React front-end application to create a fully functional chatbot powered by GPT-3. Stay tuned for the next steps!