Issue related to running of New React App

Question

I installed Nodejs(v 10.16.0 LTS) and then using Windows Powershell I run following commands

     npx create-react-app my-app
     cd my-app
     npm start

The actual problem I am facing is that if PowerShell window is opened in the background, then my code works properly. But when I close PowerShell and reload Browser Tab, the error occurs which say

This site can't be reached

localhost refused to connect.

Try:

Checking the connection

Checking the proxy and the firewall.

Kindly help me to figure out this issue. Thanks

Answer 1

When you close PowerShell window you terminate your React app as well, it has to stay opened. Running npm start kicks off local server with your app running. If you want to have possibility to have application running with terminal closed you can use libs like https://www.npmjs.com/package/forever , but I do not recommend that- it's easy to forget you have one app instance running already :)

Answer 2

When you run the command npm start , this is the expected behaviour. This command spawns a new npm instance in the directory from where you have executed it and directs it to start a server. The catch here is that the server runs as an attached process with PowerShell, by default and it is bound to terminate once you close the PowerShell window.

To manually detach a process from the terminal, we use an & after the command on a UNIX-based system (Linux, MacOS etc.) something like npm start & .In case of PowerShell, you can make use of a built-in function called Start-Process like this -

Start-Process -NoNewWindow npm start

If you'd like to read more about it, you can refer a blog post here - https://ariefbayu.xyz/run-background-command-in-powershell-8ea86436684e