create-react-app + nodejs (express) server

There's an excellent tutorial on a good way to handle this setup: https://www.fullstackreact.com/articles/using-create-react-app-with-a-server/

To summarize: you can write your node+express server in whatever way you're accustomed to - we'll say this lives in a directory called project - then nest within it a frontend directory created using create-react-app, e.g. project/client.

When you're developing, you'll actually run two servers: the backend server (npm start) and the webpack-dev-server that comes with your nested create-react-app (cd client && npm start). In your browser, you'll navigate to the url being served by webpack-dev-server (localhost:3000 by default).

In production, you don't need to run two servers. You'll bundle your frontend (cd client && npm run build), then your backend server just needs to serve the bundle, for example via express's static middleware:

if (process.env.NODE_ENV === 'production') {
    app.use(express.static('client/build'))
}

I skipped over a few details, so do check out the tutorial I linked if this setup sounds right for you.

I'd run separately nodejs server with nodemon (https://nodemon.io/) and create react app. I'd say, make server side UI-agnostic.

Just curious, why do you need to reload UI after server changes? You can complete server side, write unit/integration tests and then write UI.

Feel free to ask any questions, will try to help

I would suggest you use the concurrently and nodemon package then make some changes package.json to suite what you are trying to achieve

Edit nodemon.json file to watch changes on the server folder

{
  "watch": ["server/"],
  "ext": "js,JSON",
  "ignore": ["node_modules"]
}

Then add package.json in the root folder Your folder structure should be something like this

 app/
    client/ 
    server/
       server.js
    package.json

And add the script to start both the client and server to the package.json

   "scripts": {
    "client": "cd client && npm start",
    "server": "nodemon server/server.js",
    "dev": "concurrently \"npm run server\" \"npm run client\""
  }

Then add proxy to the package.json inside your client

  "proxy": "http://localhost:5000"