mern-starter

Quickly set up a MERN stack using the power of Docker!

What is MERN?

MERN is like the MEAN stack except it swaps out Angular for React. You use JavaScript for all the things.

M - MongoDB
E - Express
R - React
N - Node

This project uses a slightly modified MERN acronym:

M - MongoDB
E - Express
R - React+Redux+Rxjs
N - Node+Nginx

Features

Persistence Layer

• MongoDB + Mongoose ORM

API Layer

• Express REST API
• JWT authentication via Passport

UI Layer

• React+Redux+Rxjs UI built with Webpack
• CSS modules + SCSS
• Deploy to NGINX

Environment Configuration

• Both the UI and API layers utilize dotenv to load environment-specific configuration settings (see .env.sample to check out supported settings for each project)
• ENV variables can also be specified via Dockerfiles or docker-compose.yml

Development Tools

• Develop the API with Nodemon to automatically restart server
• Develop the UI with Webpack-Dev-Server and Redux-DevTools to hot reload and time travel debug
• Portainer to manage your Docker containers, volumes, networks, etc.
• Mongo-Express web GUI to manage Mongo

Get Started

Clone the repo:

git clone git@github.com:ecozoic/mern-starter.git
cd mern-starter

Install dependencies:

cd modules/ui
yarn
cd ../api
yarn

Deploy via docker-compose.yml:

docker-compose up -d

To run UI locally:

docker-compose up -d
docker stop ui

cd modules/ui

# don't forget to create .env file! 
yarn start

To run API locally:

docker-compose up -d
docker stop api

cd modules/api

# don't forget to create .env file!
yarn start

The above steps can be combined if you wish to run both the UI and API projects locally. The UI's Webpack-Dev-Server is configured to proxy API requests to the API server.

To rebuild images:

docker-compose build

To undeploy:

docker-compose down

To undeploy and remove persisted data volumes:

docker-compose down --volumes

Ports

By default, this project will bind to the following ports on the host machine:

• UI - http://localhost:8080
• API - http://localhost:8081
• Mongo-Express - http://localhost:8082
• MongoDB - http://localhost:27017
• Portainer - http://localhost:9000

Project Roadmap

• SSL support
• Improve NGINX caching
• More unit test coverage
• Improve documentation
• GraphQL?
• Document deployment process for DigitalOcean droplets