Deployment , DB & Styling

Hi - This is my first day and first post in this RW community. I went through all the videos in the tutorial section and somehow able to grasp the idea behind making this awesome FS framework which is going to make our lives easier than expected. I have much to share but will keep it short. Have a couple of basic questions

  1. Styling - Have seen RW is using TW CSS. Do I have the provision to plug-in Bootstrap / Material / Foundation / React Styled Components etc. as well?
  2. Deployment & DB configuration - I deployed my MERN stack apps in Heroku without adding any extra DB plug in/s , instead a command { heroku config:set <Mongo_URI>: } did the trick. So my question would be, can we also configure MongoDB and deployed the application in Heroku in any RW application?

Welcome! :wave:

The web side is a React app, so you should be able to use anything that you might have used with any React app.

RW doesn’t impose any styling, but does make it easy to setup TailwindCSS via a cli command.

So, RedwoodJS is often deployed with a web side on a CDN and the api side on serverless (typically something AWS Lambda compatible) such as Netlify or Vercel. But, that is not your only option.

See the Deploy section of the documentation Introduction to Deployment | RedwoodJS Docs for info about deploying to Netlify, Vercel, Render, Serverless, etc and also the section on Self-Hosting Redwood.

That said, if you are just getting started with RedwoodJS, I’d recommend to use Netlify at first since the deploys have quick setups, there is a free account, etc. You will have to provide a cloud-based database, and that can be a Heroku Postgres database.

Mongo support is currently in “Early Access” with Prisma https://www.prisma.io/docs/concepts/database-connectors/mongodb

You will need to request access to their beta program:

If you’re interested in beta testing the MongoDB connector for Prisma, please fill out this 2-minute form, and we’ll reach out with details.

Several people have tried it such as @thedavid and can also see Prisma’s progress here: MongoDB support for Prisma 2+ · Issue #1277 · prisma/prisma · GitHub

You can also see a demo vido preview of Prisma and MondDB here: https://youtu.be/nTI4jjsyoEg?t=539

Hope that helps and welcome again.

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Thanks @dthyresson for your detail explanation,helped me. Went through the deployment docs as well. Checking the Prisma + Mongo demo video right now. :slight_smile:

Couple things to add:

  • You don’t actually need to be in the Early Access program to use Prisma with Mongo, it’s currently shipped in the most recent version there’s just a lot of caveats. I wouldn’t recommend putting anything into production with it but you can start prototyping with it today.
  • If you’re following along with the tutorial videos you’ll get a good sense of the architecture of the framework and the workflow of using it, but there’s been a lot of breaking changes in the package structure and router, so follow the docs and do not use the tutorial videos when implementing a project.
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Thanks @ajcwebdev – I thought so, too, but then their docs said that you needed to request early access – so great to get that clarification! Cheers.

Hi @ajcwebdev - Thanks for your response. Today is my first day so started watching the videos and got some issues I won’t deny that. It was mentioned that node > 12 and yarn > 1.15.x would do but I was having issues. So I followed the below steps to fix the errors and able to run my first app

  1. Manually fix the node version in root package.json to V 12
  2. after creating RW app, I triggered the command yarn install '
  3. Ran the command yarn rw dev to bootstrap my app.
    I’ve mentioned the same in github Error generating the Prisma client · Issue #404 · redwoodjs/redwood · GitHub

However , I am getting some Prisma related issue while running yarn rw dev, trying to fix it :slight_smile:

Yeah the Prisma commands have also changed, those are probably the biggest breaking changes since the video tutorials. If you’re following the video tutorial and you’re at the Prisma section now you should be able to jump into the docs right here.

You don’t need to run yarn install after generating the app because your dependencies are installed for you automatically. If you are cloning a Redwood app from GitHub then you’ll run yarn install.

Thanks @ajcwebdev – I thought so, too, but then their docs said that you needed to request early access – so great to get that clarification! Cheers.

Yeah I think they want to avoid hyping it up and having a ton of people use it and flooding them with issues so they’ve tried to channel as many people to the Early Access program as possible. I only found out I could use it because I’ve been following the development of it for almost a year.

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Hi @ajcwebdev @dthyresson - After I creating a basic RW app, when I triggered ‘yarn rw dev’ I am getting the below error regarding Prisma. The page is opening in but I believe it’ll not work when I run db related command.
image