Creating a MERN application involves multiple steps that go from installing the required tools and packages to coding and deploying the application. Here’s a step-by-step guide on how you can create a MERN application with ReactJS:
1. Install and Set-Up:
- You would first need to ensure that Node.js and npm are installed on your computer as the MERN stack utilizes it for server-side rendering.
- After installing Node.js, install MongoDB on your local system or use MongoDB Atlas, which is a cloud version of MongoDB.
- You then need to install the Create-React-App package using the command `npx create-react-app mern-application-name` – you can replace mern-application-name with the name of your application.
1. Set-Up the Backend:
- Once the installations are done, go to your application directory and create a new folder named ‘backend’ with `mkdir backend`.
- Inside the ‘backend’ folder, initialize a new Node.js application with `npm init y`. Now install necessary packages: `npm install express cors mongoose dotenv`.
- Create a new file `server.js` inside the ‘backend’ folder and set up Express server.
- Connect your Express server with MongoDB using mongoose.
1. Set-Up the Frontend:
- Go to the root directory of your application and, into ‘src’ folder create a new ‘components’ folder.
- Inside this folder, create a new file `component-name.js` and implement your React component.
- Make sure you’ve installed axios using `npm install axios`, because we’ll use it to handle HTTP Requests.
1. Implement Your Application Logic:
- Define your MongoDB schema.
- Implement your frontend logic in React, creating components, views and handling the state and props.
1. Connect Backend with Frontend:
- Using axios, send HTTP requests from your React components to your Express.js API.
- Express.js API will handle the requests, making the necessary operations in the MongoDB database and then it will send a response back to the React.js frontend.
1. Run the application:
- Run the command `npm start` in both your frontend and backend directories to start the React development server and the backend server.
- Open `http://localhost:3000` in your browser to see your application running.
This is a basic guideline for creating a MERN application with ReactJS. Depending on your business logic, you might need to install more packages, create more folders and files, or set-up different backend and frontend settings.
