I really like create-react-app. It hides away all of the configuration I don't really need when I am prototyping.
An interesting use case I had recently was an application that needs client authentication. I was surprised to find out that if you started your front end dev server with a certificate and key, it would not automatically pass that to the backend in requests it proxied.
So I had to write my own proxy. Here is a sample way to pass a client certificate to your proxied backend requests whose urls start with /rest :
const fs = require('fs');
const { createProxyMiddleware } = require ('http-proxy-middleware');
module.exports = function (app) {
app.use(
'/rest',
createProxyMiddleware ({
target: {
protocol: 'https',
host: HOST,
port: PORT,
pfx: fs.readFileSync('/path/to/cert'),
passphrase: PASSWORD
}
})
);
});