React/Rails Project Setup Guide

Learning Goals

Set up a project with a Rails API backend and React frontend from scratch

Introduction

In this lesson, we'll walk through the steps needed to set up a project with a Rails API backend and React frontend from scratch. We'll also discuss the environment setup you'll need as well as a few of the important application settings to configure. Ultimately, you'll end up with an application similar to the starter code for this Rails/React project template.

Fair warning: going through this setup for the first time may take some time! The benefit is that you'll have a deeper understanding of how Rails and React are configured, and will be able to more easily customize your setup for future projects by understanding some of the design decisions that go into creating a full stack application.

The example-project directory in this repo was created by following the steps in this guide, so you can also use that as a reference to see the finished product.

Environment Setup
Project Setup
Conclusion
Resources

Environment Setup

Before starting, make sure your computer has all the necessary tools to build the application and that these tools match up with what you'll use in a production environment. This will ensure that when it comes time to deploy your project, you'll be able to do so more easily.

Requirements

Ruby 2.7.4
NodeJS (v16), and npm
Heroku CLI
Postgresql

Install the Latest Ruby Version

Verify which version of Ruby you're running by entering this in the terminal:

$ ruby -v

Make sure that the Ruby version you're running is listed in the supported runtimes by Heroku. At the time of writing, supported versions are 2.6.8, 2.7.4, or 3.0.2. Our recommendation is 2.7.4, but make sure to check the site for the latest supported versions.

If it's not, you can use rvm to install a newer version of Ruby:

$ rvm install 2.7.4 --default

You should also install the latest versions of bundler and rails:

$ gem install bundler
$ gem install rails

Install NodeJS

Verify you are running a recent version of Node with:

$ node -v

If your Node version is not 16.x.x, install it and set it as the current and default version with:

$ nvm install 16
$ nvm use 16
$ nvm alias default 16

You can also update your npm version with:

$ npm i -g npm

Sign Up for a Heroku Account

You can sign up at for a free account at https://signup.heroku.com/devcenter.

Download the Heroku CLI Application

Download the Heroku CLI. For OSX users, you can use Homebrew:

$ brew tap heroku/brew && brew install heroku

For WSL users, run this command in the Ubuntu terminal:

$ curl https://cli-assets.heroku.com/install.sh | sh

If you run into issues installing, check out the Heroku CLI downloads page for more options.

After downloading, you can login via the CLI in the terminal:

$ heroku login

This will open a browser window to log you into your Heroku account. After logging in, close the browser window and return to the terminal. You can run heroku whoami in the terminal to verify that you have logged in successfully.

Install Postgresql

Heroku requires that you use PostgreSQL for your database instead of SQLite. PostgreSQL (or just Postgres for short) is an advanced database management system with more features than SQLite. If you don't already have it installed, you'll need to set it up.

PostgreSQL Installation for WSL

To install Postgres for WSL, run the following commands from your Ubuntu terminal:

$ sudo apt update
$ sudo apt install postgresql postgresql-contrib libpq-dev

Then confirm that Postgres was installed successfully:

$ psql --version

Run this command to start the Postgres service:

$ sudo service postgresql start

Finally, you'll also need to create a database user so that you are able to connect to the database from Rails. First, check what your operating system username is:

$ whoami

If your username is "ian", for example, you'd need to create a Postgres user with that same name. To do so, run this command to open the Postgres CLI:

$ sudo -u postgres -i

From the Postgres CLI, run this command (replacing "ian" with your username):

$ createuser -sr ian

Then enter control + d or type logout to exit.

This guide has more info on setting up Postgres on WSL if you get stuck.

Postgresql Installation for OSX

To install Postgres for OSX, you can use Homebrew:

$ brew install postgresql

Once Postgres has been installed, run this command to start the Postgres service:

$ brew services start postgresql

Environment Troubleshooting

If you ran into any errors along the way, here are some things you can try to troubleshoot:

If you're on a Mac and got a server connection error when you tried to run rails db:create, one option for solving this problem for Mac users is to install the Postgres app. To do this, first uninstall postgresql by running brew remove postgresql. Next, download the app from the Postgres downloads page and install it. Launch the app and click "Initialize" to create a new server. You should now be able to run rails db:create.
If you're using WSL and got the following error running rails db:create:
```
PG::ConnectionBad: FATAL:  role "yourusername" does not exist
```
The issue is that you did not create a role in Postgres for the default user account. Check this video for one possible fix.
If your app failed to deploy at the build stage, make sure your local environment is set up correctly by following the steps at the beginning of this lesson. Check that you have the latest versions of Ruby and Bundler, and ensure that Postgresql was installed successfully.
If you deployed successfully, but you ran into issues when you visited the site, make sure you migrated and seeded the database. Also, make sure that your application works locally and try to debug any issues on your local machine before re-deploying. You can also check the logs on the server by running heroku logs.

For additional support, check out these guides on Heroku:

Project Setup

Now that your environment setup is done, we can get on to the fun part: creating your project's starter code! In this section, we'll walk through the steps needed to generate a new Rails application from scratch; set up some of the configuration; add a React application; and connect your project repository with GitHub.

Rails Setup

Notes: If you ran gem install rails to install the latest version of Rails on your system, it's likely that you'll be using Rails 7. The labs in Phase 4 use Rails 6, and there are some small differences between the two versions. We'll point out these differences in the guide below. If you'd like to use Rails 6 instead, you can follow this guide to use a specific version of Rails when generating your new project.

To start, cd into a directory where you'd like to create your project. Then run this command to generate a project folder with all the starter code for a new Rails API:

$ rails new example-project -T -d=postgresql --api

-T skips creation of test files
-d=postgresql configures PostgreSQL as the database instead of SQLite
--api configures the app with a limited set of middleware, and skips views/helpers/assets on resource generation.

This command will also initialize Git in your project folder.

Check Your Work: Rails Setup

At this point, you should verify that the application is set up correctly and in particular that you are able to use PostgreSQL as the database. cd into the project folder and run this command to create a database for your application:

$ rails db:create

Created database 'example_project_development'
Created database 'example_project_test'

If you run into any errors here, check out the Troubleshooting section of the Environment Setup and make sure you are able to run rails db:create before proceeding.

Configuring Gems

We recommend adding the ActiveModelSerializers gem to your project:

$ bundle add active_model_serializers

To enable password encryption, un-comment the bcrypt gem from your Gemfile, and run bundle install to install it.

Your final Gemfile should look something like this:

source 'https://rubygems.org'
git_source(:github) { |repo| "https://github.com/#{repo}.git" }

ruby '2.7.4'

# Bundle edge Rails instead: gem 'rails', github: 'rails/rails', branch: 'main'
gem 'rails', '~> 6.1.4', '>= 6.1.4.1'
# Use postgresql as the database for Active Record
gem 'pg', '~> 1.1'
# Use Puma as the app server
gem 'puma', '~> 5.0'
# Build JSON APIs with ease. Read more: https://github.com/rails/jbuilder
# gem 'jbuilder', '~> 2.7'
# Use Redis adapter to run Action Cable in production
# gem 'redis', '~> 4.0'
# Use Active Model has_secure_password
gem 'bcrypt', '~> 3.1.7'

# Use Active Storage variant
# gem 'image_processing', '~> 1.2'

# Reduces boot times through caching; required in config/boot.rb
gem 'bootsnap', '>= 1.4.4', require: false

# Use Rack CORS for handling Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS), making cross-origin AJAX possible
# gem 'rack-cors'

group :development, :test do
  # Call 'byebug' anywhere in the code to stop execution and get a debugger console
  gem 'byebug', platforms: %i[mri mingw x64_mingw]
end

group :development do
  gem 'listen', '~> 3.3'

  # Spring speeds up development by keeping your application running in the background. Read more: https://github.com/rails/spring
  gem 'spring'
end

# Windows does not include zoneinfo files, so bundle the tzinfo-data gem
gem 'tzinfo-data', platforms: %i[mingw mswin x64_mingw jruby]

gem 'active_model_serializers', '~> 0.10.12'

Note for Rails 7: There is currently an open issue with the active_model_serializers gem that means it won't work with Rails 7. If you run into an issue when installing active_model_serializers, try updating your Gemfile to use the following source:
gem 'active_model_serializers',
    '~> 0.10.12',
    git: 'https://github.com/jpawlyn/active_model_serializers.git',
    branch: '0-10-stable'

Finally, in order to configure your project to run in a production environment with Heroku, you'll need to update the Gemfile.lock file with this command:

$ bundle lock --add-platform x86_64-linux

Cookies & Sessions

Next, we'll configure Rails with middleware for cookies and sessions, which will enable you to use sessions for authenticating users. To add session and cookie support back in, update your application's configuration in the config/application.rb file:

# config/application.rb
module ExampleProject
  class Application < Rails::Application
    config.load_defaults 6.1

    # This is set in apps generated with the --api flag, and removes session/cookie middleware
    config.api_only = true

    # ▾ Must add these lines! ▾
    # Adding back cookies and session middleware
    config.middleware.use ActionDispatch::Cookies
    config.middleware.use ActionDispatch::Session::CookieStore

    # Use SameSite=Strict for all cookies to help protect against CSRF
    config.action_dispatch.cookies_same_site_protection = :strict
  end
end

This will add in the necessary middleware for working with sessions and cookies in your application.

The last line also adds some additional security to your cookies by also configuring the as SameSite policy for your cookies as strict, which means that the browser will only send these cookies in requests to websites that are on the same domain. This is a relatively new feature, but an important one for security! You can read more about SameSite cookies here.

To access the cookies hash in your controllers, you also need to include the ActionController::Cookies module in your ApplicationController:

# app/controllers/application_controller.rb
class ApplicationController < ActionController::API
  include ActionController::Cookies
end

Since all of your controllers inherit from ApplicationController, adding this module here means all of your controllers will be able to work with cookies.

Check Your Work: Cookies & Sessions

As a last step of the Rails setup, let's verify that the cookies and sessions middleware is working as expected. To do this, make a new controller action in the ApplicationController that uses the session hash and returns a JSON response:

# app/controllers/application_controller.rb
class ApplicationController < ActionController::API
  include ActionController::Cookies

  def hello_world
    session[:count] = (session[:count] || 0) + 1
    render json: { count: session[:count] }
  end
end

Also, create a route that uses this controller action:

# config/routes.rb
Rails.application.routes.draw do
  # route to test your configuration
  get '/hello', to: 'application#hello_world'
end

Finally, run your application:

$ rails s

Head to the browser and open up http://localhost:3000/hello. You should see a JSON response with an initial value of { count: 1}. If your sessions and cookies are configured correctly, you should be able to refresh the page and see the count increment by 1 each time. If not, review the steps above before proceeding.

Commit your changes before moving ahead:

$ git add .
$ git commit -m 'Rails setup'

React Setup

For the frontend portion of the application, you'll be using create-react-app to generate a new React application in the same directory as your Rails application. In your terminal, verify that you're in the right directory by running pwd and checking that you are in the root of your Rails application. Then, run:

$ npx create-react-app client --use-npm

NOTE: If you get an error that says "We no longer support global installation of Create React App" try the following command instead:

npx create-react-app@latest my-app --use-npm

This will create a new React application in a client folder, and will use npm instead of yarn to manage your dependencies.

When running React and Rails in development, you'll need two separate servers running on different ports: React on port 4000, and Rails on port 3000. Whenever you want to make a request to your Rails API from React, you'll need to make sure that requests are going to port 3000.

You can simplify this process of making requests to the correct port by using create-react-app in development to proxy the requests to our API. This will let you write your network requests like this:

fetch("/hello");
// instead of fetch("http://localhost:3000/hello")

To set up this proxy feature, open the package.json file in the client directory and add this line at the top level of the JSON object:

"proxy": "http://localhost:3000"

Also update the "start" script in the the client/package.json file to specify a different port to run our React app in development:

"scripts": {
  "start": "PORT=4000 react-scripts start"
}

Your final client/package.json file should look something like this:

{
  "name": "client",
  "version": "0.1.0",
  "private": true,
  "proxy": "http://localhost:3000",
  "dependencies": {
    "@testing-library/jest-dom": "^5.14.1",
    "@testing-library/react": "^11.2.7",
    "@testing-library/user-event": "^12.8.3",
    "react": "^17.0.2",
    "react-dom": "^17.0.2",
    "react-scripts": "4.0.3",
    "web-vitals": "^1.1.2"
  },
  "scripts": {
    "start": "PORT=4000 react-scripts start",
    "build": "react-scripts build",
    "test": "react-scripts test",
    "eject": "react-scripts eject"
  },
  "eslintConfig": {
    "extends": ["react-app", "react-app/jest"]
  },
  "browserslist": {
    "production": [">0.2%", "not dead", "not op_mini all"],
    "development": [
      "last 1 chrome version",
      "last 1 firefox version",
      "last 1 safari version"
    ]
  }
}

Check Your Work: React Setup

Now that you've configured React, it's a good time to check that your settings are correct and that you're able to make a request from React and receive a response from Rails. First, update the starter code in the client/src/App.js file to make a request to the route you set up previously in Rails:

import { useState, useEffect } from "react";

function App() {
  const [count, setCount] = useState(0);

  useEffect(() => {
    fetch("/hello")
      .then((r) => r.json())
      .then((data) => setCount(data.count));
  }, []);

  return (
    <div className="App">
      <h1>Page Count: {count}</h1>
    </div>
  );
}

export default App;

Next, run the Rails server in one terminal:

$ rails s

Open another terminal and run the React server:

$ npm start --prefix client

Head to the browser and view your React application at http://localhost:4000/. You should be able to refresh the page and see the count state increment on each refresh because of the code in the ApplicationController#hello_world method from earlier.

Commit your changes before moving ahead:

$ git add .
$ git commit -m 'React setup'

Deploying

It's recommended that you deploy your project early, and push up changes often, to ensure that your code works equally well in production and development environments.

If you've already set up your environment to deploy to Heroku, you can run the commands below to deploy your application. If not, make sure to check out the Environment Setup section above and ensure you have the Heroku CLI installed.

First, you'll need to add a configuration file for React that will tell Heroku how to build our application when it's deployed. Remember, create-react-app is ultimately used to create a single-page application, with just one HTML file that will serve all of our React code. We can use Rails to serve that HTML file by adding it to a public directory in the Rails application, so our goal after deploying is to have a public folder with all of our production-ready React code.

To achieve this, in the root directory of your project (not the client directory), create a package.json file with the following:

{
  "name": "example-project",
  "description": "Build scripts for Heroku",
  "engines": {
    "node": ">= 14"
  },
  "scripts": {
    "build": "npm install --prefix client && npm run build --prefix client",
    "clean": "rm -rf public",
    "deploy": "cp -a client/build/. public/",
    "heroku-postbuild": "npm run clean && npm run build && npm run deploy"
  }
}

When you push up new code to Heroku, it will detect if there is a package.json file in the root of your application, and will run the heroku-postbuild script defined in the package.json file. This script does the following:

clean: First, it deletes all files in the public directory (to remove any old versions of your React application)
build: Next, it installs all the project dependencies in the client folder with npm install and builds a production version of your React application using webpack, which creates a bundled and minified version of your codebase for optimal performance, which is output to a client/build folder
deploy: Finally, it copies the the files from the client/build folder to the public folder, which will be served by Rails whenever a request comes in to a non-API route in the application

You can see what this command does locally by running it from your terminal:

$ npm run heroku-postbuild

The final output will end up in the public folder in the root of your project.

After adding this package.json file, you should also create a Procfile in the root of your application, where you can also define more custom scripts that will run when your application is deployed:

web: bundle exec rails s
release: bin/rake db:migrate

This Procfile instructs Heroku to run our Rails server with rails s, and also to run any pending migrations when new code is pushed up.

Finally, it's time to deploy! To deploy, first log in to your Heroku account using the Heroku CLI:

$ heroku login

Create the new Heroku app:

$ heroku create example-project

Note: the name you choose for your project must be unique as it will show up as part of the URL (https://example-project.herokuapp.com).

Add the buildpacks for Heroku to build the React app on Node and run the Rails app on Ruby:

$ heroku buildpacks:add heroku/nodejs --index 1
$ heroku buildpacks:add heroku/ruby --index 2

To deploy, commit any pending changes to your code, and push to Heroku:

$ git add .
$ git commit -m 'Added configuration files'
$ git push heroku main

Note: depending on your Git configuration, your default branch might be named master or main. You can verify which by running git branch --show-current. If it's master, you'll need to run git push heroku master instead.

When you push the code to Heroku, it will run a few commands to build the application in order based on the "buildpacks" we configured:

heroku/nodejs: will run the heroku-postbuild script defined in the package.json file to build the React application
heroku/rails: will install all the Rails dependencies from the Gemfile

Watch the output in the terminal to see what's happening. If any error messages appear, read them carefully to diagnose the issue and make the recommended changes, then commit and push your code again to retry the deployment.

Any time you have changes to deploy, just make sure your changes are committed on the main branch of your repo, and push those changes to Heroku to deploy them.

Check Your Work: Deploying

You can view your deployed app in the browser with:

$ heroku open

You should see your React application in the browser. Try refreshing the page to see if the sessions logic and requests to the Rails API are working as they did when running the application locally.

You can also see details about your app from the Heroku dashboard, and by running commands from the Heroku CLI. For example, you can view the server logs:

$ heroku logs --tail

Press control + c to exit the logs. You can also run a Rails console and other Rails commands on the production server with heroku run:

$ heroku run rails c

Configuring React and Rails for Client-Side Routing

In many React applications, it's helpful to use React Router to handle client-side routing. Client-side routing means that a user should be able to navigate to the React application; load all the HTML/CSS/JavaScript code just once; and then click through links in our site to navigate different pages without making another request to the server for a new HTML document.

To install React Router, run:

$ npm install react-router-dom@5 --prefix client

Note: make sure to include @5 in the install command to install React Router version 5 (which is what we cover in the curriculum), instead of version 6.

Next, update the App component to use a couple routes for testing purposes:

// client/src/components/App.js
import { useState, useEffect } from "react";
import { BrowserRouter, Switch, Route } from "react-router-dom";

function App() {
  const [count, setCount] = useState(0);

  useEffect(() => {
    fetch("/hello")
      .then((r) => r.json())
      .then((data) => setCount(data.count));
  }, []);

  return (
    <BrowserRouter>
      <div className="App">
        <Switch>
          <Route path="/testing">
            <h1>Test Route</h1>
          </Route>
          <Route path="/">
            <h1>Page Count: {count}</h1>
          </Route>
        </Switch>
      </div>
    </BrowserRouter>
  );
}

export default App;

When you run the app locally using npm start and webpack is handling the React server, it can handle these client-side routing requests just fine! Try it out: run React in one terminal and Rails in another:

$ rails s
$ npm start --prefix client

Make a request to http://localhost:4000 and http://localhost:4000/testing. Both routes work just fine because we're running a separate server for React.

However, when we're running React within the Rails application after deploying, we also have routes defined for our Rails API; and Rails will be responsible for all the routing logic in our application. There will be only one server running: the Rails server; all the React code will run client-side in the browser.

So let's think about what will happen from the point of view of Rails when a user makes a request to these routes:

GET /: Rails will respond with the public/index.html file. This is what we want to happen for all client-side routes.
GET /testing: Rails will look for a GET /testing route in the config/routes.rb file. If we don't have this route defined, it will return a 404 error.

Any other client-side routes we define in React will have the same issue as /testing: since Rails is handling the routing logic, it will look for routes defined in the config/routes.rb file to determine how to handle all requests.

We can solve this problem by setting up a custom route in our Rails application, and handle any requests that come through that aren't requests for our API routes by returning the public/index.html file instead.

Here's how it works:

# config/routes.rb
Rails.application.routes.draw do
  get '/hello', to: 'application#hello_world'

  get '*path',
      to: 'fallback#index',
      constraints: ->(req) { !req.xhr? && req.format.html? }
end

All the routes for our API are defined first in the routes.rb file. You can optionally use namespacing to differentiate the API requests from other requests.

The last method in the routes.rb file handles all other GET requests by sending them to a special FallbackController with an index action:

# app/controllers/fallback_controller.rb
class FallbackController < ActionController::Base
  def index
    render file: 'public/index.html'
  end
end

This action has just one job: to render the HTML file for our React application! Note that the FallbackController must inherit from ActionController::Base in order to render HTML.

Check Your Work: Client-Side Routing

You can test out if the new code for handling client-side routing is working locally by building a production version of your React application and running the Rails server. To do this, you can use the same heroku-postbuild script locally as Heroku will run in production to build the React project:

$ npm run heroku-postbuild

Then, run the Rails server:

$ rails s

Now, visiting http://localhost:3000 (not 4000) will show the production version of the React application, served from the public/index.html file!

You should also be able to visit other client-side routes, like http://localhost:3000/testing, to verify that the fallback route configuration is working.

Finally, commit and push your code to Heroku:

$ git add .
$ git commit -m 'Configured client-side routing'
$ git push heroku main

Test your client-side routes in the deployed application once the new version is built and released:

https://example-project.herokuapp.com
https://example-project.herokuapp.com/testing

GitHub

First, create a new remote repository on GitHub. Head to github.com and click the + icon in the top-right corner and follow the steps to create a new repository. Important: don't check any of the options such as 'Add a README file', 'Add a .gitignore file', etc — since you're importing an existing repository, creating any of those files on GitHub will cause issues.

If you're working with a partner, add them as a collaborator on GitHub. From your repo on GitHub, go to Settings > Manage Access > Invite a collaborator and enter your partner's username. Once your partner has access, they should git clone (not fork) the repository.

Finally, connect the GitHub remote repository to your local repository and push up your code:

$ git remote add origin [email protected]:your-username/your-repo-name.git
$ git push -u origin main

You can also configure automatic deployments to Heroku so that any time you push a new commit to your main branch on GitHub, it will trigger a new deployment on Heroku! Otherwise, you can continue using git push heroku main to deploy new releases.

Conclusion

Congrats on setting up your Rails/React project! 🎉

In this guide, you:

Created a new Rails API application
Configured cookies and sessions
Added a React frontend
Configured your application for deployment
Tested your application locally and in production
Set up a GitHub repository

From here on out, as you continue adding features, make sure to push your changes up to GitHub and to Heroku regularly, and check that your features work in the production environment as you go.

You should also make sure to update your project's README file with details about your project.

We'll let you take it from here. Good luck!

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