Setting up fullStack web app for React and Go Lang

This is a guide on how to setup a web app with Go/GoLang, React and MongoDB

Assuming you have already installed Go language and NodeJS in you machine. If not please install with the links above.

A the time of writing I am using go version go1.14.2 darwin/amd64, and Nodejs v13.8.0

So the first thing we want to do is to set up a server first with Go, the easiest framework that I found is fiber which has very similar syntax like ExpressJs, personally felt easier for people who comes from NodeJs world.

This is what they said on their main doc:

Fiber is an Express inspired web framework build on top of Fasthttp, the fastest HTTP engine for Go. Designed to ease things up for fast development with zero memory allocation and performance in mind.

Lets create a project folder:

mkdir fullstackgoreact

go into the folder and install fiber with:

go get -u github.com/gofiber/fiber

and create a main go file,

touch main.go

and add these code into main.go file

package main

import "github.com/gofiber/fiber"

func main() {
  app := fiber.New()

  app.Static("/", "./public")

  app.Listen(3000)
}

now when you run

go run main.go

you should see something like my screenshot

When you open localhost:3000 on your browser but you see a blank page with Not Found since there is no front-end static files yet.

Lets setup a frontend project with Create-React-App

on the same folder as main.go, close go application by pressing control C
with same terminal enter:

npx create-react-app frontend
npx allows you to run npm code without installing this package.

Now run

cd frontend && yarn build 
This will build react app, the built folder is on /frontend/build

go back to previous folder with

cd ../ && vim main.go
modify the static folder and by changing ./public to ./frontend/build save and exit.

run

go run main.go

Open up browser and check localhost:3000 again, and there you go, you have your first react go application.
You should see what I see in the screenshot

I will cover connecting Go and React with MongoDB on next post.