How can I use create-react-app with Spring Boot?

Question

I'm trying to serve a ReactJS app together with an API built with Spring Boot. I've run the script create-react-app on /public/ - as shown on the structure below - however, all relative paths from ReactJS seems to be broken when I try to access it from http://localhost:8080/public/index.html

What else do I need to do in order to correctly load the resources from ReactJS?

Answer 1

I suggest you create two projects:

• one for your Spring Boot backend;
• one for your React frontend, created with create-react-app.

In dev mode, you have to run the React development server with node: 'npm start'. You should define a proxy to your Spring Boot app: "proxy": "http://localhost:8080", to add to your package.json. Documentation of this mechanism is here. And you can execute your backend as usual with Gradle: ./gradlew bootRun.

In production deployment, you can generate a build of your React app with npm run build. The static files produced by create-react-app can be placed in a static directory in your Spring Boot application, for instance in src/main/resources/static/ (docs about static content with Spring Boot)

I hope this helps!