This is the second part of my post which will focus on connecting the react app with laravel.

The first thing to do is to scaffold a new laravel project. Ensure you've installed composer.

Scaffolding a new laravel app

We are going to use composer to create our new laravel app.

composer create-project laravel/laravel example-laravel-app

Once scaffolded navigate into your laravel app and initiate a git repository.

cd example-laravel-app
git init
git add .
git commit -m "Initial Project"

Once again head over to github and create a new repository and push to it.. For this tutorial it will be called cpanel-laravel-example

We are going to push to our exisiting repository, so we will follow the github commands.

Once pushed our repository should look like this

Connecting our react app to the laravel app on localhost

Now we are working with two repositories, you can add both of them under a workspace if you are using VSCode.

Let's open the first one: example-react-app

Open the file menu and add the example-laravel-app to workspace.

Editing laravel routes

Under the laravel project open routes/web.php

We will make our route to return the current server time..
So edit the code to this.

Route::get('/', function () {
    return [
        'status'    => true,
        'message'   => null,
        'data'      => now()
    ];
});

Once edited we will launch our laravel server. Let's open a terminal.

Click on the Terminal menu > New terminal

Select the laravel project

We will have our terminal

Let's start the server by running the command php artisan serve

Then open the link in the browser.

We got exactly what we are expecting.
Now let's commit and push our changes.
git add .
git commit -m "Updated route"
git push

Proxying react dev server request

Open vite.config.js under the example-react-app and add the server option. Read more at https://vitejs.dev/config/server-options.html

Update the config with this

export default defineConfig({
  server: {
    proxy: {
      "^/(api|storage)/.*": {
        target: "http://localhost:8000",
        changeOrigin: true,
        rewrite: (path) => path.replace(/^\/api/, ""),
      },
    },
  },
  plugins: [react()],
});

We are going to proxy every request that begins with /api or /storage to the laravel server.

Also we added the changeOrigin option to avoid CORS error https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/CORS

We also need to rewrite the request path by removing /api/ from the beginning because a request to http://localhost:8000/api/ doesn't exist as we haven't defined any route to /api in our laravel application so it will be converted to http://localhost:8000/.

To test this let's open two terminals using the instruction earlier.
One for the react app and one for the laravel project.

Start the laravel server inside the terminal with php artisan serve

Start the react dev server the way you scaffolded it, in my case I used pnpm so it will be pnpm dev. Yours could be yarn dev

Open the react dev server link

Add /api/ at the end. Note the trailing / at the end of api, it's required because that's how we defined our proxy.

You will get the same response as you would if accessing the laravel server directly

With that done let's commit our changes under the react app.
git add .
git commit -m "Enabled proxy for /api and /storage"
git push

Fetching data

A real-world example will be to fetch data from the laravel server in our react app.
So let's edit src/App.jsx in our react app and update it will an effect that fetches the time.

function App() {
  const [loading, setLoading] = useState(true);
  const [time, setTime] = useState(null);

  useEffect(() => {
    fetch("/api/")
      .then((response) => response.json())
      .then((data) => {
        setTime(data.data);
        setLoading(false);
      });
  }, []);

  return (
    <div className="App">
      <div>
        <a href="https://vitejs.dev" target="_blank">
          <img src="/vite.svg" className="logo" alt="Vite logo" />
        </a>
        <a href="https://reactjs.org" target="_blank">
          <img src={reactLogo} className="logo react" alt="React logo" />
        </a>
      </div>
      <h1>Vite + React</h1>
      <div className="card">{loading ? "Loading" : time}</div>
      <p className="read-the-docs">
        Click on the Vite and React logos to learn more
      </p>
    </div>
  );
}

This is the result..

Now let's commit and push our changes in the react app.

git add .
git commit -m "Fetch and show time"
git push

A working example of the laravel project can be found at: https://github.com/sadiqsalau/cpanel-laravel-example

With all that done, the next part of this post explains how to deploy the laravel application to our cpanel shared hosting.