如何使用Nginx通过Express路由器加载页面

Question

So I'm building an end to end application (With node.js/mysql back end, react front end, and using the express router), but I'm having trouble setting up a local development server. I don't need it to be accessed from the outside world, just be able to load different pages connecting to the express router. I don't have any dev ops experience for this, so I'm trying to use nginx to point it to the router which I can't figure out. Is there an easier way to do this?

I also need to run this on a windows machine, which just makes everything slightly more complicated

Answer 1

You'll probably want to use https://github.com/facebook/create-react-app

create-react-app my-app will set up everything you need (webpack, etc.), and then npm start will start a local development server.

Should work on Windows, but I don't know, because I wouldn't use/recommend Windows ;-)

Answer 2

It's not entirely clear from your description how your application is set up and what the role of Nginx is.

So I'll start from the beginning...

Nginx is primarily an HTTP server which can also function as a proxy for HTTP requests. If you've written a Node.js application using Express, you have written an HTTP server which can handle any routes you have set up and can also serve your static assets (ie. HTML pages, images, front-end Javascript, CSS, etc.). In this case, there is no need for Nginx - if you wrote something like the Express "Hello World" app , then you will see a message like "Example app listening on port 3000" and you can connect to your app by visiting http://localhost:3000 in your browser.

That's it - there's literally nothing else to your app and there is no need for Nginx (or any other HTTP server) to run your application.

Now that's not to say that there is no role for Nginx in your application, but it may not be as an HTTP server. One possibility is that you may want to set up Nginx as a proxy, to handle certain routes by sending the requests to your Node application. For example, I set up an application some time ago which uses Nginx to proxy API routes for my application to a Node application and to serve static assets directly. This may be what you have in mind - if it is, you will need to configure different routes in Nginx to serve different things (and unfortunately there's not enough information in your question to give suggestions on this).

As an aside, you're probably going to find this much easier to set up using Linux - perhaps the Windows Linux Subsystem, a virtual machine running Linux, or Docker.