Tutorial 20: Building a Node.js Backend for a React Frontend

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React Frontend with Node Backend – Node.js Tutorial 20

React Frontend with Node Backend – Node.js Tutorial 20

In this tutorial, we will be covering how to create a React frontend and a Node backend using Node.js. React is a popular JavaScript library for building user interfaces, and Node.js is a runtime environment that allows you to run JavaScript on the server side. By combining these two technologies, we can create a powerful and efficient web application.

Setting Up The Node Backend

First, we need to set up the Node backend of our application. We can do this by creating a new directory for our project and running the following command to initialize a new Node.js project:


npm init -y

This will create a package.json file with default values. We can then install the necessary dependencies for our backend using the following command:


npm install express body-parser

We can now create a new file called server.js and set up our Node backend using the Express.js framework. We can create a simple endpoint that returns a JSON response like this:


const express = require('express');
const bodyParser = require('body-parser');

const app = express();
const port = 3000;

app.use(bodyParser.json());

app.get('/api/data', (req, res) => {
res.json({ message: 'Hello from the Node backend!' });
});

app.listen(port, () => {
console.log(`Server running on port ${port}`);
});

Creating The React Frontend

Next, we can create the React frontend of our application. We can do this by running the following command to create a new React project:


npx create-react-app frontend

This will create a new directory called frontend with all the necessary files for our React application. We can then cd into the frontend directory and start the development server using the following command:


npm start

We can now create a new file called App.js and make a request to our Node backend using the fetch API. We can then display the response in our React frontend like this:


import React, { useState, useEffect } from 'react';

function App() {
const [data, setData] = useState('');

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

return (

React Frontend with Node Backend

{data}

);
}

export default App;

Conclusion

In this tutorial, we have covered how to create a React frontend and a Node backend using Node.js. By combining these two technologies, we can create a powerful and efficient web application. We have also demonstrated how to make a request to the Node backend from our React frontend and display the response. We hope this tutorial has been helpful to you in understanding how to create a full stack web application using React and Node.js.

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@codebreakthrough
10 months ago

⭐Check out UltraEdit – https://calcur.tech/Ultraedit
React Series – https://calcur.tech/reactpart1
Node.js YouTube Playlist – https://calcur.tech/nodejs

@deivymorales1
10 months ago

Ya esta el codigo hecho, asi no tiene gracia men. Toca todo desde cero.

@allahwetrust9626
10 months ago

Hey Caleb Thank you so much for the great content ! Could You Please Tell Me If We Could Specify The same port and domain for the react app and node.js ? Again Thank You So Much !

@michaelrachman7155
10 months ago

I love this series thank you so much

@ericboadu-oi2xd
10 months ago

You are a great teacher man. thank you for delivering these programming tutorials and making it easier for us beginners to learn and understand how these things work

@AmericanDragon134
10 months ago

Стоитли изучать Node js в 2023?