Deploying React.js App on GAE

For people like me who have only used a static host like Amazon S3 before, deploying React app on Google App Engine is a challenge. For all the references I found it looks straightforward and easy to deploy a React app, yet I still struggled for 2 days. Here is how I did it, with the things I realized by logs and tries and errors.

So you can't just push the build. You have to serve it, like starting a development server. So the next problem is, how?

They are npm install and npm start.

Like I mentioned before, for merely starting a server for React, these two seems enough. Then I found out it's not, because default npm start provided by Create-React-App, which equals to node scripts/start.js if you check out package.json, takes much time, and it's long enough to make the app not working. So we need a faster way to serve it.

Literally, serve.

Notice serve needs static files to run, so we need to build it first. Since GAE only runs two scripts, and building takes some time too, so I bound it to postinstall instead of prestart . By this way, GAE automatically builds right after it installs dependencies.

You can also use some host framework (like express) to do the hosting and routing stuff too.

React development server default port is 3000, and serve's is 5000, while GAE uses 8080.

The scripts in package.json I used when finally successfully deployed looks like this:

"script": {
  "postinstall": "npm run build",
  "start": "serve -l 8080 -s build"
}

You need to configure app.yaml too, but I think many resources is talking about how to do it.

I hope this helps!