Deploying an Express / React app with Now

(View the full source code here)

Historical note (August 2026): Zeit is now Vercel, Now 2.0 and the @now/* builders are retired, and Parcel 1's parcel-bundler package is deprecated. The deployment configuration remains below for historical context; use the current Vercel documentation and Parcel 2 for a new application.

This post shows how an Express server can serve a React frontend built with Parcel and be deployed with the former Now platform.

Create the project structure

Get started by creating the project directory, initialising a new Node project and installing required dependencies.

# Create new directory
mkdir my-project
cd my-project

# Create new node project
yarn init

# Install dependencies
yarn add express react react-dom

# Install devDependencies
yarn add --dev parcel-bundler rimraf

# Install now-cli globally
yarn global add now

The intended project structure we're going to create looks like this:

my-project
├── server
│   ├── dev-server.js
│   └── index.js
├── src
│   ├── index.css
│   ├── index.html
│   └── index.js
├── now.json
├── package.json
├── README.md
└── yarn.lock

Use the following to create a standard .gitignore file for a node project and create the directory structure.

# Add a gitignore to your project
npx gitignore node

# Create server directory
mkdir server
touch server/index.js
touch server/dev-server.js

# Create client directory
mkdir src
touch src/index.js
touch src/index.html
touch src/index.css

Server-side

// server/index.js
const path = require('path');
const express = require('express');

const app = express();
const port = process.env.PORT || 8080;
const dist = path.resolve(__dirname, '..', 'dist');

app.get('/api/healthcheck', (req, res) => {
  return res.send('Healthy!');
});

if (process.env.NODE_ENV === 'production') {
  app.use('/static', express.static(dist));
  app.get('*', (req, res) => res.sendFile(path.join(dist, 'index.html')));
}

if (require.main === module) {
  app.listen(port, () => {
    console.log(`Listening at http://localhost:${port}`);
  });
}

module.exports = app;

// dev-server.js
const path = require('path');
const Bundler = require('parcel-bundler');
const app = require('.');

const entry = path.resolve('src/index.html');
const bundle = new Bundler(entry);

app.use(bundle.middleware());

app.listen(process.env.PORT || 8080, (err) => {
  if (err) throw err;

  console.log(`Listening at http://localhost:${process.env.PORT}`);
});

Client-side

src/index.html

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
  <head>
    <title>Express with Parcel</title>
  </head>
  <body>
    <div id="root"></div>
    <script src="./index.js"></script>
  </body>
</html>

src/index.js

import React from 'react';
import ReactDOM from 'react-dom';

import './index.css';

const App = () => (
  <div className="app">
    <h1>Express / React / Parcel / Now</h1>
  </div>
);

ReactDOM.render(<App />, document.querySelector('#root'));

src/index.css

html,
body {
  margin: 0;
  padding: 0;
  background: #1d1d35;
  color: white;
  display: flex;
  flex-direction: column;
  height: 100vh;
  text-align: center;
  justify-content: center;
  -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased;
  font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, 'Segoe UI', Roboto, Oxygen,
    Ubuntu, Cantarell, 'Open Sans', 'Helvetica Neue', sans-serif;
}

Add scripts

Add dev script to run the app in development mode. We'll run it using yarn dev.

{
  "scripts": {
    "dev": "NODE_ENV=development PORT=8080 node server/dev-server.js"
  }
}

Next, we'll add a start script to run the app in production mode.

{
  "scripts": {
    "dev": "NODE_ENV=development PORT=8080 node server/dev-server.js",
    "start": "NODE_ENV=production node server/index.js"  }
}

And finally we'll add a build script to build a production version of our client side code and output it to a dist folder. The production server will send the dist/index.html file for all incoming requests, with the exception of API requests.

{
  "scripts": {
    "build": "rimraf dist && NODE_ENV=production parcel build src/index.html --public-url=/static",    "now-build": "yarn build",    "dev": "NODE_ENV=development PORT=8080 node server/dev-server.js",
    "start": "NODE_ENV=production node server/index.js"
  }
}

Deploy your app

The original project used Now 2.0 by Zeit to deploy.

Create a now.json file at the root of your project and add the following:

{
  "version": 2,
  "name": "my-project",
  "routes": [
    { "src": "/static/(.*)", "dest": "/dist/$1" },
    { "src": "/(.*)", "dest": "/server/index.js" }
  ],
  "builds": [
    { "src": "dist/*", "use": "@now/static" },
    { "src": "server/index.js", "use": "@now/node" }
  ]
}