See this running here.
Simple Example with Client and Server
Now can be used to host all kinds of stuff. In this example, we have a (very, very simple) front-end web application (consisting of a single index.html file), and we have a (very, very simple) back-end web server (consisting of a single micro instance).
But understand that this is really no different from a full-stack web app in the important ways. The output of your webpack build is going to be a static folder, just like app/ here. It'll be more complex, but fundamentally it's the same thing.
Similarly, your server may be running express and talking to a database or whatever, but at the end of the day it's a node application (or something else running in docker).
The question is, how can these two aspects of your project be deployed in a way that lets them communicate together? We don't want to serve the static front-end files out of the backend, because that requires a server redeploy every time we change something, etc. We want the ability to decouple two things that are very separate parts of the same project.
Now to the rescue!
Using now, we can deploy the front-end code to one server and the back-end code to another server. The Front End is deployed as static files - we just take the following steps (note: in this code, I'm using l3.wtf as my host. For you to run this, you'll want to change that to a host you control on now).
cd appnownow alias [resulting host] [app.yourhost.com]
Now, when you go to app.yourhost.com in your browser, you'll see your front-end app. But, you will get an error if you're trying to hit the server - because we haven't set it up yet.
So, cd ../api to go to your API server. Note that in index.js I'm manually specifying Access-Control-Allow-Origin to point to app.l3.wtf - that's my server, you'll want to change this for your own. Once you've done that, just take the following steps:
nownow alias [resulting host] [api.yourhost.com]
And bam, you've got both running, and the app server can communicate with the API server.
Is it that simple?
Yeah, but you probably want to get a bit more clever about hostnames. Maybe build it into your webpack build script for the client, and use envars for your api?