See this running on Heroku at https://plantapp.herokuapp.com/

• An Express app is the backend, serving the data api.
• A create-react-app is the web frontend. node-foreman is used to run them together. (As suggested in this post).
• The database is PostgreSQL with a pg-promise interface. The plant data comes as a .csv file from the USDA Plants Database.

$ git clone https://github.com/hillscottc/plantapp
$ cd plantapp
$ npm install

• Note: The client project is independent of the server project. So a postinstall script is added to run npm install on the client dir as well. In package.json, you see:

    "scripts": {
      "postinstall": "cd client && npm install"
  

$ npm start

This launches the Server and Client with foreman.

The services can also be run individually. For example to run just the server:

$ npm start:server

Or, with foreman:

$ nf start server=1

node-foreman provides several benefits. In this project, it is used primarily for two things:

1. Configure our client (React) service and server (Express) processes. This is done in the Procfile:

   web: npm run start:client
   server: npm run start:server
   

2. Configure environment variables read by at launch. This is done with a .env file:

   {
     "node": {
       "env": "development"
     },
     "mongo": {
       "url": "mongodb://localhost/plantsdb"
     },
     "server": {
       "port": 3001
     }
   }

   Then these variables can be accessed from javascript like: process.env.MONGO_URL.