Example spring-boot backend and react frontend

Usually frontend and java backend developers are used to their tools:

• frontend developers often uses npm/yarn + webpack and develop in javascript/typescript.
• java backend developers often uses maven/gradle and develop in any JVM languages.

In this scenario we will explore a typical use case where frontend developers will develop a web application that will use some REST services exposed by a JVM backend application.

In a cloud environment like Kubernetes, it's more likely that the frontend server will be developed in nodejs and acts as a proxy by forwarding the API calls to the JVM backend.

But if you need to integrate with some spring-cloud and spring-cloud-netflix technologies such as Eureka and Spring cloud config, it's easier to deploy your react web application in a Spring Boot application as this integration comes for free.

This example will show you how to integrate a Reactjs web application and a Spring Boot application (based on Spring Boot Web Reactive) while using both the tools that frontend and backend developers are used to.

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NOTE

Do not hesitate to have a look at JHipster project which comes with an awesome and more advanced integration between Angular or React and Spring Boot.

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Root project

Initialize a gradle project with gradle wrapper init command

Backend

Go to spring-boot Initializr and fill the form to create your project.

Here I choose:

• gradle project
• kotlin
• group id: com.powple
• artifact id: backend
• dependencies: Spring Reactive Web, Spring Boot DevTools

Then we will create a web service that will be used by the frontend. Here I decided to use the Webflux functional endpoints. See RoutesConfiguration.

In order to use SPA application router (eg. angular, reactjs or vuejs router), we have to resolve unknown path to the index.html page. This is achieved thanks to SpaWebFluxConfigurer and the / route

Then add in settings.gradle.kts:

include('backend')

Options

Caching static resources

Add spring.resources.cache.period: 126227704 in application.yml to enable caching headers for 4 years.

Frontend

We will create a new react application based on create-react-app utility:

npx create-react-app frontend

Then optionally rename extension of file containing JSX from .js to .jsx to avoid IDE conflict with javascript code style.

Then change the react application to use that greeting service, see:

• App.jsx
• GreetingService.js

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NOTE

The greeting service try to reach the API as if it was exposed locally: /api/greetings. In development, we will request the development web server to act as a proxy by forwarding all the API call to our java backend. In production, the react application will be served by Spring Boot so the API is actually exposed locally.

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Add in settings.gradle.kts:

include("backend")

Development

In development, we will to our Webpack development server to proxy all unhandled request to the backend API.

We can do so by adding in package.json:

{
  //...
  "proxy": "http://localhost:8080"
}

You can find more information here

Once it is done, you will be able to run your backend server and frontend web server separately and while developing, you will see the changes directly.

Backend

You will need to configure your IDE to auto-rebuild your project when it detects a change so that Spring Boot DevTools can reload the changes. Check the doc for more info.

Alternatively, you can run in a terminal ./gradlew :backend:bootRun but you won't have auto-rebuild functionality.

Frontend

Then in another terminal, you can run:

cd frontend
yarn install
yarn start

Then it should pop up your default browser with the Reactjs application at http://localhost:3000. Make some changes and see how it impacts the web app.

Production

We need to package the result of the build made by yarn build command to the Spring Boot application.

In order to do that, we will use the gradle-node-plugin to allow us to run yarn/npm tasks from gradle and at the end, make processResources task from the backend to depends on frontend yarn build.

1. First, add in settings.gradle.kts before backend:

include("frontend")

2. Make yarn/npm tasks depends on gradle tasks in build.gradle.kts in frontend.

3. Make backend gradle processResources task depending on frontend gradle yarn_build tasks in build.gradle in backend and copy the frontend build output into /static folder in the jar file. More information on how spring-boot can serve static content.

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NOTE:

In this project, the backend will depend on frontend build only when the gradle property prod is set. It is to avoid that we systematically rebuild the frontend when we are only developing in the backend.

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That's it! You can now serve your react application from a Spring Boot application using REST services in kotlin or any JVM languages.

Let's try this:

./gradlew clean build -Pprod
 java -jar backend/build/libs/*.jar

Then open your browser at http://localhost:8080. Hooray!