Some Things to Check Before Doing Literally Anything Else

December 3, 2018

You're working on a web app that uses Mongo, Express, React, and Node. You've got your components. You've got your models and your routes. But when you run npm start, something ain't working. Nothing's rendering to the DOM. Your dev console says some vague error in red. You're stumped.

What do you do?

Well, before you really go into a panic and dive head-first into the deep end of your code, here are some basic things to check for.

Some basic things to check for:

1. DID YOU ADD A PROXY TO YOUR WEBPACK

   Go to your webpack.config.js and add these three simple lines into your devServer object, right under historyApiFallback: true.

   proxy: {
       '/api': 'http://localhost:3000'
   }
   

   You can thank me later.

2. DID YOU ADD A PROXY TO YOUR WEBPACK

   ...did you, though?

3. Is your server running?

   Probably not a bad idea. Go to your server directory, and run node server.js. Are there any errors there?

4. Is your MongoDB running?

   Go to your server directory and run gomongo, or whatever alias you have for starting up your MongoDB instance. Then restart your server.

Hopefully this helps.