Checking your development setup

In this section, we will go through the development workflow and write code step-by-step to ensure the environment is correctly set up to start developing and running MERN applications.

We will generate these project files in the following folder structure to run a simple setup project:

| mern-simplesetup/
  | -- client/
    | --- HelloWorld.js
    | --- main.js
  | -- server/
    | --- devBundle.js
    | --- server.js
  | -- .babelrc
  | -- nodemon.json
  | -- package.json
  | -- template.js
  | -- webpack.config.client.js
  | -- webpack.config.client.production.js
  | -- webpack.config.server.js

Note

The code discussed in this section is available on GitHub in the repository at:github.com/shamahoque/mern-simplesetup. You can clone this code and run it as you go through the code explanations in the rest of this chapter. 

Initializing package.json and installing npm modules

We will begin by using npm to install all the required modules. It is a best practice to...