I'm using create-react-app in my latest project and it's great! Now I'm facing one issue that I'm not sure how to solve properly.
I've created app using redux for my state managment, and that all is working well.
Now I don't have much experiance with server side renderin in React, but for my next feature I'll need to take one of the existing / working react components (that are connected to redux store) and render it on server that comes with create-react-app. The reason why I wanna do this is to be able to use some libs like pdf generators and simillar to be able to print out some of them (also some other stuff but that's the basic).
First thing I'm confused with, since I don't want to render everyting on server, what's the best / correct way (for development) to run webpack-dev server and node server that will do all those taks I mentioned above in parallel instead of just changing it's default port to let's say 8000, and run it manually?
Secound, should I be able to just use ReactDOMServer.renderToString on that existing component on server or there is something else that will complicate stuff (I know I'll need to add babel on server definitaly)?
Create React App does not support server rendering. You might want to migrate to Next.js which does.
Unfortunately, Create React App (CRA) doesn't have extensibility points to allow this. But there is a slightly altered version of CRA that allows compiling, testing and running both client-side and server-side code using regular CRA pipeline - npm start will compile and launch both cient-side and server-side portions of your app, using a single instance of Webpack, on the same HTTP port.
You can find more info by visiting React App SDK.