Kickstart Your Full-Stack App in Seconds with create-sb-react-express

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Building a modern full-stack app shouldn’t feel like assembling IKEA furniture blindfolded. That’s why I created create-sb-react-express — a powerful CLI that scaffolds a modern full-stack monorepo using React + Tailwind (Vite) on the frontend and Express + PostgreSQL on the backend… in seconds.

What Is It?

create-sb-react-express is a zero-setup tool for developers who want to build fast, scalable full-stack apps with:

  • 🧩 Monorepo architecture using npm workspaces
  • ⚛️ React + Vite + Tailwind CSS frontend
  • 🚀 Express + PostgreSQL backend
  • 🐳 Docker-ready Postgres environment
  • ⚡ Unified dev server using concurrently
  • 🧪 Test-ready structure on both ends
  • 📦 CLI scaffolding via npx

Why Use It?

Whether you’re building a portfolio project, MVP, or internal tool, this tool saves hours of boilerplate setup. Instead of setting up routing, database pools, Tailwind configs, or Docker scripts manually, just run:

npx create-sb-react-express my-app
cd my-app
npm install
npm run dev

You now have a fully-functional dev environment with hot-reloading frontend and backend servers.

🏗️ Folder Structure

my-app/
├── client/               # React + Tailwind (Vite)
│   ├── components/       # Shared UI components
│   ├── context/          # Context + test structure
│   ├── pages/            # Page components
│   ├── api/              # Client-side API fetchers
│   └── main.jsx
│
├── server/               # Express + PostgreSQL
│   ├── controllers/      # Route handlers
│   ├── db/               # Pool config, queries, seed
│   ├── routes/           # API endpoints
│   ├── expressInit.js    # Express setup
│   └── docker-compose.yml
│
├── package.json          # npm workspaces + scripts

📜 Scripts Overview

Inside package.json:

{
  "scripts": {
    "client": "npm run dev --prefix client",
    "server": "npm run dev --prefix server",
    "start": "concurrently \"npm run client\" \"npm run server\"",
    "dev": "concurrently \"npm run client\" \"npm run server\""
  }
}


Run both frontend and backend with one command:

npm run dev

First-Time Setup

To get everything running:

  1. Start PostgreSQL using Docker cd server docker-compose up -d
  2. Seed the database node db/populatedb.js
  3. Rename environment files mv client/.env.example client/.env mv server/.env.example server/.env
  4. Start development servers npm run dev

Vite runs on localhost:5173, Express on localhost:3000.

Installation

npm i -g create-sb-react-express

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