thanks Sandeep, specially for the promptness! So am i right in also assuming then that all the server side code - controllers, models, routes, tests folders as well as the config.js would sit on a different code base as opp to this kit? so we'd be left with only the server.js ( minus the mongoose stuff ) and the fetchData.js under utils right? so a very light weight server

Hi Rick, we managed to do what you are saying. Like you said, MERN is defined perfectly like a starter kit should be and simple enough to separate out the api server. I put up a couple of sample repos which have the code separated out github.com/sudhamab/mern-without-api-server and https://github.com/sudhamab/mern-api-server. These can be run in conjunction and it took very little effort to do this. I think the kit is great in that it lets you keep things simple if you want to or then modify it.

As for the other Universal Hot example you were mentioning, thats really good too and we like it a lot, but 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. I think at some point we'll have to learn from both these and create our own version of it. Thanks for mentioning it though.

PS: The credit for the underlying code for the 2 sample repos above has been given to the Hashnode team. I just wanted to share it as an example for reference in case it helps others like us.

hey Zach, I was not planning to use the same server domain, so basically one server ( on a different host perhaps ) would only be responsible for rendering and serving the components, and the other would be responsible for serving api calls - addPost, deletePost , etc. This would allow the api server to not worry about the rendering n stuff. We think later on this model could scale better. Any thoughts? But ya, I am running into Cross-origin issues and somehow simply setting 'Access-Control-Allow-Origin': '*' did not fully help.. so trying to debug it