Comment by Sandeep Panda on "Hashnode looks pretty amazing. Its very fast, smooth and looks client heavy. I am curious about the stack used in hashnode?"

Thanks Chris for the nice words. :) The website looks sleek thanks to @fazlerocks.

@fibric and @sportebois have listed out a lot of components of our stack already. So, basically we are using MERN (Mongo Express React Node) stack and here are different components :

Application

Node.js/Express server + Nginx
React : We use React with Flux architecture. Alt is the flux implementation of our choice. As we are building an isomorphic app, we also use Iso to hand off data from server to client.
Socket.io - For realtime feed updates.
Server Side Events (SSEs) - We are experimenting with SSEs for realtime push notifications.

Storage and Data

We use MongoDB and Redis for storage purpose. Bull is used for message queue, which in turn uses Redis.

CDN

We use Cloudinary to store/transform/serve images. We are doing a lot of image transformations, face detection etc and cloudinary is really good at this. We no longer use Cloudfront. You are seeing Cloudfront urls because of old Devmag (previously) data.

Build tool

Gulp
Browserify

Testing

Enzyme by AirBnB
Mocha

Servers

Devmag (previous version) was on DigitalOcean. With Hashnode we migrated to Azure and so far the experience is nice.

Mail Delivery

Mandrill.

Analytics

Google Analytics
CleverTap (previously Wizrocket)

We experimented with Keen.io while running Devmag, but found out that CleverTap has a lot to offer in their free tier - so we made the switch.

We are huge fans of Isomorphic apps and are going to invest a lot in this area. Today we are able to build web apps quickly because of the contributions from the community. We would like to give back to the community in various ways. Hashnode will contribute a lot to React/Isomorphic apps field in coming days. On a side note - if you are building something cool or have an awesome side project we would like to sponsor it. Email me at sandeep@hashnode.com.

Sandeep

Thanks for the insights! Indeed I was confused, seeing Cloudfront, but on the other hand I saw network.microsoft.com and netwk.msn.net nodes when I tracerouted hashnode.com. ... With the old devmag components (hence the Cloudfront), then the Azure hosting makes a lot of sense with that data.

Amazing. Impressed that its a isomorphic app! Thanks @sandeep

I am on the same kind of stack and searching for additional tools, and your stack give me some to play with, awesome thank you ! BTW, Hashnode is great, i do not regret my one click signup aha !

Be careful with Mongo and make sure you replicate soon enough :)

Are you guys doing something for server side rendering? Or google is able to render js and understand the content in it?

P.S I want to know is google ready for JS content or not.

@evivz Hashnode is isomorphic. So, it renders on both server and client. As far as I know, Google now executes JavaScript, but you will still face problems with other services (in case of only client side rendering).

@sandeep panda thanks for reply.

Can I know what you are using for server side rendering? (Sorry I might sound noob here)

I don't know if you can use react itself and do server side rendering.

@evivz Our backend is Node.js. So, we can directly use React.renderToString() to render our components on server.

It's so helpful, any one can get a idea if one is going to create this type of application. Thanks Sandeep Sir for this informative post

@sandeep wonderful. I feel proud you guys build a community of developer. Which is use by all over the world. Thank you so much for give incredible platform. keep doing this.

just wondering if there is any changes to the stack mentioned in the post (since it's posted at the end of 2015) ? Thanks in advance Sandeep Panda

Ammar Faris Nothing much has changed in terms of tech stack. However, we have switched back to DigitalOcean now. Also, we are using MixPanel/Amplitude as our analytics backend, instead of CleverTap.

Thank you so much for your super quick response Sandeep Panda . Really awesome platform! Actually I bumped into the platform when looking at the mern.io website. Oh one more.. Do you guys still use Alt or are using Redux?

What a killer stack. I loooooove it.

Any changes in the stack ? or still you guys are continuing the same ?

sravank Hi Sandeep Panda Still are you guys are using the same tech stack? pls confirm

Search Hashnode