Deploy a React app to Google App Engine in 5 minutes

Sometimes finding a working example for what is supposed to be a simple task is a challenge. This repo contains a current (July 2020) example of how to configure the app.yaml to deploy a create-react-app default build to Google's App Engine standard.

Prerequisites

NodeJS
Google Cloud SDK (gcloud CLI)
Active Google Cloud Platform (GCP) project

Example

Usage

Download the setup.sh, teardown.sh, and app.yaml files to your computer
Create a .env (dotenv) file:

cat > .env << EOF
export APP_NAME="app-engine-react-demo"
export PROJECT_ID="<YOUR GCP PROJECT ID>"
EOF

Run the setup script

./setup.sh

Wait several minutes and then view the app in your browser

App Engine Config

The tricky part is getting the app config working. There are some examples for App Engine (flex) and differing approaches for flex and standard, but this is a concise working example that will deploy the artifacts from the /build folder after running npm build.

# app.yaml

env: standard
runtime: nodejs10
service: app-engine-react-demo

handlers:
  - url: /static
    static_dir: build/static

  - url: /(.*\.(json|ico|js))$
    static_files: build/\1
    upload: build/.*\.(json|ico|js)$

  - url: .*
    static_files: build/index.html
    upload: build/index.html

Cleanup

To avoid unexpected charges be sure to either delete your project or delete the app you deployed using the provided teardown.sh script.

./teardown.sh