How do you connect the frontend and the backend?

Question

I'm still kind of new in programming and I'm not quite sure that this is the place to ask this question, but I can't find anything worthy on the Internet. Sorry on first place but I'm truly lost. All I can find is "just use wordpress" and things like that.

I'm trying to make a website from zero with HTML and CSS, and there I would have the front end. I know a little bit of backend but I'm still learning. The real question is: how do you mesh up all of this and put it on the Internet so others can see it? I know you have to buy a domain and so, but how do you put it all together? What do you exactly do with your server-side code if what you "upload" is the HTML code? Are there any good books on the subject or something so I can study it on my own?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

I think the word you are looking for is "web server." Examples of web servers are Apache, nginx, and IIS. A web server is a computer program.

A simple web server is sometimes called a "static web server."

To see a bit how this works, you can install a static web server like http-server on your computer (which requires Node.js to run), point it at a directory, and browse the site on your own PC.

So if you have a folder called "my-site" and a file in it called "index.html" and you ran the http-server in the my-site folder, and you went to http://localhost:8080, you would see "index.html" in your browser.

To put all this on the internet:

• First, if you have an internet connection at home then you could technically set something up on your laptop that people could connect to. I won't get into it here because it's a little involved, but I think it's important conceptually to understand that you could do it if you wanted to.

• You need to get access to a web server. A relatively fast way to set this up would be with zeit.

Answer 2

Read about web frameworks like Spring in Java or Django in Python. Start with a lecture of these to grasp a notion of backend and frontend working together:
https://www.quora.com/How-do-front-end-and-back-end-technologies-work-together
https://www.quora.com/How-are-the-front-end-and-back-end-connected
https://www.quora.com/How-does-frontend-code-and-backend-code-interact-with-each-other

EDIT
And don't forget to read about the MVC pattern.

Answer 3

If all you want to know is how to publish an html/css project to make your website live then you need a domain, hosting account, your project files, and an FTP program.

Buy a domain and hosting account through a website like godaddy. Once you have that then you basically have your own little server. A server is just a machine thats on 24/7 which holds your project and makes the files live on the internet for people to view.

Once you create your project, then use ftp software such as filezilla to connect to your server. Drag your project into the public_html folder and your website will be live!