This is the second part of my post which will focus on connecting the react app with laravel.
The first thing to do is to scaffold a new laravel project. Ensure you've installed composer.
Scaffolding a new laravel app
We are going to use composer to create our new laravel app.
composer create-project laravel/laravel example-laravel-app
Once scaffolded navigate into your laravel app and initiate a git repository.
cd example-laravel-app
git init
git add .
git commit -m "Initial Project"
Once again head over to github and create a new repository and push to it.. For this tutorial it will be called cpanel-laravel-example
We are going to push to our exisiting repository, so we will follow the github commands.
Once pushed our repository should look like this
Connecting our react app to the laravel app on localhost
Now we are working with two repositories, you can add both of them under a workspace if you are using VSCode.
Let's open the first one: example-react-app
Open the file menu and add the example-laravel-app
to workspace.
Editing laravel routes
Under the laravel project open routes/web.php
We will make our route to return the current server time..
So edit the code to this.
Route::get('/', function () {
return [
'status' => true,
'message' => null,
'data' => now()
];
});
Once edited we will launch our laravel server. Let's open a terminal.
Click on the Terminal menu > New terminal
Select the laravel project
We will have our terminal
Let's start the server by running the command php artisan serve
Then open the link in the browser.
We got exactly what we are expecting.
Now let's commit and push our changes.
git add .
git commit -m "Updated route"
git push
Proxying react dev server request
Open vite.config.js
under the example-react-app
and add the server option. Read more at https://vitejs.dev/config/server-options.html
Update the config with this
export default defineConfig({
server: {
proxy: {
"^/(api|storage)/.*": {
target: "http://localhost:8000",
changeOrigin: true,
rewrite: (path) => path.replace(/^\/api/, ""),
},
},
},
plugins: [react()],
});
We are going to proxy every request that begins with /api or /storage to the laravel server.
Also we added the changeOrigin
option to avoid CORS error https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/CORS
We also need to rewrite the request path by removing /api/
from the beginning because a request to http://localhost:8000/api/
doesn't exist as we haven't defined any route to /api
in our laravel application so it will be converted to http://localhost:8000/
.
To test this let's open two terminals using the instruction earlier.
One for the react app and one for the laravel project.
Start the laravel server inside the terminal with php artisan serve
Start the react dev server the way you scaffolded it, in my case I used pnpm so it will be pnpm dev
. Yours could be yarn dev
Open the react dev server link
Add /api/
at the end. Note the trailing /
at the end of api, it's required because that's how we defined our proxy.
You will get the same response as you would if accessing the laravel server directly
With that done let's commit our changes under the react app.
git add .
git commit -m "Enabled proxy for /api and /storage"
git push
Fetching data
A real-world example will be to fetch data from the laravel server in our react app.
So let's edit src/App.jsx
in our react app and update it will an effect that fetches the time.
function App() {
const [loading, setLoading] = useState(true);
const [time, setTime] = useState(null);
useEffect(() => {
fetch("/api/")
.then((response) => response.json())
.then((data) => {
setTime(data.data);
setLoading(false);
});
}, []);
return (
<div className="App">
<div>
<a href="https://vitejs.dev" target="_blank">
<img src="/vite.svg" className="logo" alt="Vite logo" />
</a>
<a href="https://reactjs.org" target="_blank">
<img src={reactLogo} className="logo react" alt="React logo" />
</a>
</div>
<h1>Vite + React</h1>
<div className="card">{loading ? "Loading" : time}</div>
<p className="read-the-docs">
Click on the Vite and React logos to learn more
</p>
</div>
);
}
This is the result..
Now let's commit and push our changes in the react app.
git add .
git commit -m "Fetch and show time"
git push
A working example of the laravel project can be found at: https://github.com/sadiqsalau/cpanel-laravel-example
With all that done, the next part of this post explains how to deploy the laravel application to our cpanel shared hosting.
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