Kenzie MERN Starter Template

Getting Started

You will need to install the following tools:

Yarn

Yarn is a package manager, just like NPM. However, yarn is a bit more modern and easy to use. We will be using yarn to build and run our apps.

https://classic.yarnpkg.com/en/docs/install/

Follow the steps for your operating system to install yarn.

MongoDB

To use Cloud MongoDB Atlas: Follow the instructions in the Deployment Reading on my.kenzie.academy

To use Local MongoDB: Install MongoDB and start your server: MongoDB instructions

Mac OS

Run these commands:

brew tap mongodb/brew
brew install mongodb-community@4.4
brew services start mongodb-community@4.4

Or, follow the guide here: Install MongoDB on MacOS

Windows

First, download the MongoDB Community Server MSI and install it. You can use all of the default options.

When that is finished installing, you can close "MongoDB Compass" if that pops up.

Then you must start the MongoDB Service:

Click the start menu and type "services", Click the Services console.
From the Services console, locate the MongoDB service (The list is alphabetical)
Right-click on the MongoDB service and click Start.

Then download the MongoDB Database Tools

Those should download to a path like: C:/Program Files/MongoDB/Tools/100/bin Take note of that path when you install them.

Next, open GitBash.

cd to your home directory, cd ~

Then run

echo "PATH=$PATH/c/Program\ Files/MongoDB/Tools/100/bin" > .bashrc

Where that path should match the path that you installed the MongoDB Database Tools. This will make all of the tools accessible to you on GitBash.

and run:

touch .bash_profile

Now close the GitBash window and re-open it before continuing.

If you get stuck, you can reference the guide here: Install MongoDB on Windows

Running the application

This app is configured to run both the frontend and the backend from the root directory of this project.

First, install all of the dependencies. You should only need to do this once.

yarn install

You can start the entire application by doing:

yarn develop

This will live-reload all of the code as you edit it.

The deployment itself will run:

yarn start

But this WILL NOT do live-reload. If you run the app with yarn start then you will have to stop your server and restart it every time you make a change! So it is much better to use yarn develop when coding locally.

Note that you must be in the root folder of this repository to run both the front and backend!

Folder structure

The front and backend are held inside of packages/client/ and packages/server/

If you cd into those folders, you can run them individually by using yarn start.

Adding packages

During development, you can add dependencies to the frontend or backend from the root folder:

yarn workspace client add react-router-dom 
yarn workspace server add mongoose

This would add a "react-router-dom" dependency to the frontend, and a "mongoose" dependency to the backend.

MixOfWar/test