Thanks Sylvain for commenting. The linked resources are useful as well. :)

Perfect. I could have used the installer, but was thinking of other ways to do it. Didn't know npm could be used to upgrade Node. Thanks Jakub!

Thank you Jan...

Thanks so much!

How about using some caching solutions like Varnish? Have you had any success with it?

Thanks Jos for the answer!

I have been using Webpack in my workflow and react hot-loading is pretty easy to integrate there as well. This article provides in-depth info about various options of implementing hot-loading, giving RequireJS a shot for hot-loading doesn't sound like a bad idea but the article undermines the importance of isomorphic apps and so the use case for it. I would still prefer to use Webpack and react-hot-loader over anything else because of its end-to-end solution and that the hassle of switching to RequireJS is just not worth it.

Thanks Jan. All these make sense!

Thanks! That's a great piece of advice. :)

One should always use environment variables to differentiate between development and production environments. I keep a config file to define various variables, connection strings etc. If the variables are set in environment I utilize them otherwise I use the default values meant for local usage . For example, a connection URL in config file may be initialized as following : connection = process.env.connectionString || localConnectionString In development mode connection will point to localConnectionString while in production mode it'll be initialized with process.env.connectionString . In fact if you use PaaS solutions like OpenShift, Heroku etc you are expected to follow these standards.