Node Fullstack Monorepo Boilerplate

A fully Dockerized simple and modular Node-based full stack monorepo boilerplate.

Requirements

• Node 16+
• NPM 8+
• Docker CLI

Features

• Typescript
• Fully Dockerized application
• ESLint
• VSCode debugger configured for server
• Hot reload configured for both server and webapp
• Basic Github workflows configuration

Technical Stack

Server

• Koa 2
  • Koa Router
  • Koa Bodyparser
  • Koa JSON

Webapp

• React 18
• React Router
• Redux

Installation

The project is set up as a Github template. To use this template follow this Github Guide

Because this is a monorepo so we need to run npm install three times in three different places to set up the local development environment. This mostly to stop the IDE from complaining.

• ./ project root folder - installs modules for eslint
• ./server project folder - installs modules for the server project
• ./webapp project folder - installs modules for the webapp project

Running the application

The application default URLs for the services:

• server: localhost:3000
• webapp: localhost:8000

Running the application on root folder: npm build ; npm start. This will invoke Docker to build the necessary images to run the containers.

It's also possible to run each service individually outside of docker:

• Server - npm run dev
• Webapp - npm run dev

NPM Scripts

Root level:

# start docker compose
npm start
# build docker images
npm build
# build docker images then start application
npm run start:build
# remove all docker artifacts
npm run clean:docker

Server:

# start the server from ./dist
npm start
# builds the server, transpiled server is in ./dist
npm build
# runs development server with nodemon
npm run dev

Webapp:

# runs the react server with webpack
npm run dev

Notes

• ./webapp/webpack.config.js uses a NODE_ENV environment variable to distinguish environments
• transpiled server files are served from ./server/dist with the environment variable NODE_PATH

Motivation

It's easy to find opinionated boilerplates for all kinds of preconfigured Node-based applications. Yet, it's difficult to find modular and minimalistic boilerplates. It's even more difficult to find a monorepo boilerplate of the same. As a result, this project was built.

This monorepo intends to be easy to build on with very minimal starter code. It also lets the user completely change some underlying frameworks such as swapping Koa to Express. I have also configured some development features such as hot code replacement and VSCode debugger.