How to set up a React app with a Flask and MongoDB backend using Docker
In this short article I will go through how to set up and containerize a full stack web application with a React frontend, a Flask RESTful API and a MongoDB database using Docker.
If you want, you can clone the code in the article on GitHub right away.
In my work as a researcher in Additive Manufacturing - or 3D printing if you will - I was recently faced with setting up a modern full stack web application in one of our projects. We wanted an API which could easily connect to Python based ML frameworks, modules written in C++ and a database to handle unstructured data. Oh, and it should be easy to deploy too! I am a chemical engineer who have mostly developed websites in PHP and MySQL so you can imagine how daunting this task felt at first.
Eventually, after some research, I decided to use a well proven combination of popular and easy to use technologies with mature user communities:
- React. A popular and widely used Javascript framework for building user interfaces.
- Flask. A lightweight web application micro-framework built on Python. We will use Flask to build an API which React can consume.
- MongoDB. A NoSQL database which stores information using a JSON-style storage format without fixed…
