@sudhama nice! It would be good to have the structure in those repos in MERN by default. it packs in a lot of stuff so initially we got a bit overwhelmed because the reasoning behind how certain things were done were not obvious to us. Yeah that was my first reaction to it as well. I think you have to start from just React and build up to using everything included in that boilerplate, but once you get there it's a truly great way to build applications.

Keep in mind that MERN has just one server which handles both the web rendering and the API. It just does a really good job at separating the code. So if you use a different API with BASE_URL , you'll probably want to gut this from your server.js: app. use ( '/api' , posts); IMO MERN should move to different processes for the web tier and API tier. I think react-redux-universal-hot-example is a good example of this.