jstoebel/mern_template

my template for MERN stack apps, based on https://github.com/sahat/hackathon-starter

MERN template

This is my starter template for MERN stack applications. In a sea of choices that is the Javascript/React ecosystem I wanted an example app that utilizes current libraries in a way that make sense to me. While there are things like create-react-app and mern.io. The underlying assumption for those solutions is that the developer doesn't want to bother with all of the implementation details of getting a MERN app off the ground. While that viewpoint has merit, I wanted to understand how technologies like ES6, Webpack, React, JSX, Redux (and on and on and on...) all fit together. This app serves as a learning experience for how to piece together those technologies, a reminder when I am stuck later on, and, most importantly, a jumping off point for spinning up new apps. This app might not include everything that a MERN developer might need, but I can say confidently that I fully understand everything in this app, which, I think is the more important thing.

Influences

Creating this sample app, I drew on many resources and tutorials. Some were so influential that they are worth mentioning here:

• Hackathon Starter
• Refactoring a Basic, Authenticated API with Node, Express, and Mongo
• Building a React/Redux App with JSON Web Token (JWT) Authentication

Technologies used

Front End

• React
• Redux

Backend

• MongoDB
• Mongoose (ORM)
• Json Web Tokens (Authentication)

Build system

• Webpack

Syntax

• ES6
• JSX

Testing

• Mocha
• Enzyme (for simulating React components inside tests)

mern_template's Issues

need to bust cache when rebuilding client

add to linter: no commented out code

get it here https://github.com/bahmutov/eslint-rules

need store to persist on reload

create README

add logout

setup store in src/client.js

add tests

integrate CI

fix linting issues

there's a lot of em!

tweaks to allow heroku to build project

change all components to be .jsx

integrate Auth0

add error alerts

use webpack define plugin to define global variables inside the client

example: API_URL

add heroku setup script and build script

remove unused dependencies

There are a bunch of dependencies that aren't in use. Let's get rid of them to speed up build time and time to yarn add new packages