How does Express and React Routes work on initial GET request from browser?

Question

I'm new to the react world and to the fullstack world as a whole but I've searched endlessly for an answer to the following and some guidance would be really appreciated.

I'm creating an app using React and Express. It requires authentication so I was planning on using Passport to help. The client side JS uses React Routers to navigate through the website. That's all fine but my issue is with the initial GET request made by the browser.

I'll first describe my specific app requirements and then generalize what I don't understand.

As I said, my application requires OAuth2 authentication. If you try to GET a path on my website and you're not logged in, it should just load the login page. If you are logged in, then load as normal and find your path. Similar to facebook, I'd like the login URL to be the same as the "feed" page. So similar to how facebook.com '/' route is either the login page or your new feed depending on whether you are signed in, I want the same thing.

From what I understand, Passport authenticates on the back end by checking the request header. So I understand that I should have some kind of middleware that says "if user is signed in, continue down the routes otherwise render sign in page" ... How is this done? What would the code look like? My only experience with Express was from an intro class which used res.render to send back an HTML file and pass it through some template engine like handlebars. But I have no idea how it'd work with react routes. Would i still use res.render()? Something else?

Let's say my index.html has the root div to inject the react into. If I had to guess, I'd send back that index.html page with the .js file with the routes and somehow on the backend send back the route I want it to match on my react routes (either the login one or the user requested)??

More generally, I guess I'm just confused how the initial request to a website using react routes is done. 1) How does the server interact with everything to render what I asked for? 2) What would the code look like for that. My only experience with React is from a basic Udemy course that just used "react-scripts start" to render the page.

After spending the entire day Googling this question it led me to SSR which is a rabbit-hole of its own and I'm not even sure if its what I need to help me. Is it?

I'm clearly missing some fundamental knowledge as this is really tripping me up so if you have any resources to learn more just post them. Thanks!

Answer 1

Simply point Express to the folder containing your React files or build files.

app.use(express.static(__dirname + '/dist'));

where 'dist' contains the build files

See docs for more details

Answer 2

SSR is a little bit confuses for developer that has less experience, let forget it for now.

It will be more easier for you to assume that frontend JavaScript (React) and backend Javascript (NodeJS) are two separate apps, and they communicate to each other via API.

here the code that show Login component and Feed component depending on whether you are signed in

import React, { Component } from "react";
import axios from "axios";

class Home extends Component {
  constructor() {
    const accessToken = localStorage.getItem("accessToken");
    this.state = {
      accessToken,
      feeds: []
    };
  }

  componentDidMount() {
    if (this.state.accessToken) {
      axios(`api/feeds?accessToken=${this.state.accessToken}`).then(({ data }) => {
        this.setState({
          feeds: data
        });
      });
    }
  }

  render() {
    if (this.state.accessToken) {
      return <FeedsComponent feeds={this.state.feeds} />;
    }
    return <LoginComponent />;
  }
}

and this is your backend

const express = require("express");

const app = express();

app.get('/api/feeds', (req, res, ) => {
    const feeds = [
        {},
        {}
    ]
    res.status(200).json(feeds);
});

app.listen(3001);

just keep in mind that they are two separate apps, the can be in two different folder, different server, different port.

Answer 3

I think the fundamental gap you're struggling with stems from that lot of those 'intro courses' shove the entire browser client into the application server to get things up and running quickly, as in, the Node server renders the entire React app AND operates as an API...

 // Ajax request from React app to: http://example.com/api

app.use('/api/*'),()=> {
   res.send({ <!-- some JSON object -->})
})

// User visits in browser: http://example.com/**/*     

app.use('/*',()=>{
   res.render(<!-- entire React App sent to browser -->)
})

The first request (assuming the user doesn't visit /api/* ) will just send down the React bundle. Further user navigation within the client would generally send XHR requests (or open WebSockets) from the React app to Express routes running on the same node program.

In many situations it makes sense to have these parts of your program separated, as by having react delivered from a completely different location than where it requests data. There's many reasons for this, but optimizing computing resources to their differing demands of CPU, memory, network .etc and manageability of code/deployment are the big reasons for me.

For example...

• User visits: http://example.com *

  1. Nginx, Apache, a 'cloud proxy' .etc direct the traffic to a static React bundle, which has no authentication and never makes contact with your Node server.
  2. If the user has Authenticate previously they will have token in local storage (if you're using JWTs for Authentication) and your React app will be configured to always check for these tokens when you first it is initially loaded.
  3. If the user has a token it will send an Ajax request in the background with the token as a Header Bearer and will send back user data, then redirect them to an 'Authenticated page' like the FB feed you mention.
  4. If they don't have a token or the token Authentication fails then React will redirect them to the Login or Registration page

React

React basically high jacks the browser's native 'location' functionality (whats displayed after you domain name). So any events after the initial page load (buttons clicks and such) are handled entirely by React internally and uses those routes to determine what to display or what data to fetch from the API through Ajax (XHR).

If the user performs a hard page reload then that request will go back to the server and it will perform the whole cycle over again

React Router

Allows you to do 2 things simultaneously...

1. Manipulate the browser Location and History objects.
2. Use that History and Location information elsewhere by detecting changes and sending off events.

SSR

I've only toyed around with SSR so I can speak to it, but its provides extremely low latency for initial renders, doing it in 1 network request, so you want to use it areas of your program where thats important.

Not sure if this answers you question, but let me know if you would like me to elaborate on anything or provide some more detailed resources.

Answer 4

I understand your struggle as I've had to go through it myself when combining front-end with back-end, specifically React and Node. So first things first, we know that the browser/client will always initiate a request to the server, so how does React Router take control of the routes? Well its plain simple actually, all you have to do is return the entire react app from any route from your express server. The code will look something like this:

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

app.get('/*', (req, res, next) => {
  // Return React App index.html
});

app.listen(3000);

Once the react app renders on the user browser (don't worry about paths, as react will automatically render according to the URL based on the code you wrote in the client side, it will also take care of authentication vs feed page when it will scan for your local storage, cookies, etc), it will take control of routing, instead of a request going to the express server. But what happens when we request data from our server, well it returns react app on each route so we need to setup an api route to handle any data requests.

app.get('/api/v1/*', (req, res, next) {
  // Return some data in json format 
});

Hopefully, this gives you insight about what you were looking for.