Some webdev knowledge gained

Easlier this year I had to split a Koa/SPA app into two separate apps. As part of that I switched from webpack to Neutrino.

Through this work I learned a lot about full stack development (frontend, backend and deployments for both). I could write a blog post per item, however, listing it all in here is better than never getting to write a post for any of them.

Note, I’m pointing to commits that I believe have enough information to understand what I learned.

Npm packages to the rescue:

• Prevent commits from adding linting issues with lint-staged and husky

Node/backend notes:

• How to better configure HMR
• Make HMR work by closing the previous server
• Add source-map-support to help development
• Start project on debugging mode (use --inspect rather than inspect)
• How to properly start Neutrino in production

Neutrino has been a great ally to me and here’s some knowledge on how to use it:

• Add PostCss support
• Specify custom env variables to be passed down into the app
• Add a favicon.ico to your app
• Configure Travis to use --inspect with Neutrino after any failures
• Include a custom font to your SPA
• How to properly call Neutrino with Istanbul

Heroku was my tool for deployment and here you have some specific notes:

• Add a postbuild script for Heroku as well as adding a static.json to configure how to server the frontend code
• Tell the server to send all routes from the root (since we use dynamic routing via React-router)
• Same change but for Netlify
• Changes to enable Heroku review apps and configue for SPAs