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Flask & create-react-app

This is an example on how to use a react frontend in your Flask app. It uses create-react-app (CRA) so you don't need to configure much yourself!

Note that CRA is mainly for single-page apps - so if that's not what you want, then you may want to configure webpack yourself instead.

Installation

  • Create and activate a virtualenv
  • pip install -e .
  • Inside the flask_cra_example/client/ directory: npm install

Running

Dev server

  • Use flask run as usual to start the dev server.
  • Inside the flask_cra_example/client/ directory, use npm start to run the CRA dev server.

Note: The frontend will proxy all /api/ requests to the Flask app, which it expects on http://127.0.0.1:5000.

You can use the FLASK_URL env var to override this (it's used in setupProxy.js - see the CRA docs for details on the proxy feature).

To access your app, go to http://localhost:3000 (you can use PORT env var if you want a different port).

Production build (development)

The CRA server, just like the Flask dev server, is not meant for production. Luckily CRA provides an option to do a static build for production: npm run build

The Flask app is configured to serve those files correctly when accessed directly, so after building you can go to http://localhost:5000 and your webapp should work.

Note that in this case autoreloading is not available and you need to run npm run build whenever you changed something in the frontend.

Production

For a real production deployment, you use npm run build as well, but instead of using the Flask dev server you use a real web server (like nginx+uwsgi).

Also, there's no reason to have your frontend served through Flask - so the web server should be configured to serve the files from the flask_cra_example/client/build directory, and only forward /api/ requests to the Flask app.

Your own app

If you want to use this in your own app, do not just copy the whole client folder!

Instead, use npx create-react-app client to create it from scratch. All you then need to do is updating a few things to integrate e.g. with the Flask routing system to build URLs.

Check the commits in this repo to see what changes were done - it's not much, and by running create-react-app yourself you are sure to have the latest version of it!