📄️ What is the MERN Stack
The MERN stack is a technology stack commonly used to build JavaScript applications. It uses a MongoDB database, the Express framework for the back-end, the React framework on the front-end, and the server is powered by the Node.js runtime.
📄️ Explore the application
For the purpose of this workshop, the most simplest possible application is used to demonstrate the MERN stack. The easiest use case would be a back-end with a route to write a new database entry, and another route to retrieve all entries.
📄️ Start a local database
The recommended way to run MongoDB nowadays is by using MongoDB Atlas, the cloud offering by MongoDB. It is much easier to manage clusters through Atlas. However, in some cases, developers like to have a local instance of MongoDB running as part of their environment. This can be easier to avoid data corruption, or to enable fully offline development environments.
📄️ Start the backend
The first step to run everything locally is to start the back-end server.
📄️ Start the frontend
Now that you've got a database and a backend, it's time to start the frontend to interact with those other components in a much friendlier way.