webpack-dev-middleware VS react-specials

Are you using webpack? If so, they have a middleware for exactly this case: https://github.com/webpack/webpack-dev-middleware. The example there should be added to your express script with some form of conditional statement to use express.static in your deployment and webpack-dev-middleware in dev.

It looks like this should have been fixed back in 2017: https://github.com/webpack/webpack-dev-middleware/issues/229

Meteor-Webpack integrates webpack-dev-middleware and webpack-hot-middleware to benefit HMR in your project. The only thing you have to do is enabling this feature just like any other Webpack project;

I built a MERN stack project as my first full stack project. Here's the repo: https://github.com/cagross/react-specials

Yes, this is indeed how my project is organized (repo here).

I have a MERN app, and the React app and Express app are both deployed together (using cyclic.io). You can see the repo here, if you want to see how I set up my folder structure. Basically, the root of the folder is a Node project--the Express app. In a sub-folder i've installed a second Node project--the React app. Then the main Express file needs some lines to tell it to properly server the React app to certain routes.

Is that right? I've been committing my React build directory to Git since I begain the project. You can see the repo here. What are the disadvantages of committing the build directory? I get that it can unnecessarily bloat the size of the repo in many cases, especially in cases where Heroku builds the same files anyway. But in my case, the size of the build directory is only ~300 kB. So maybe that's an acceptable tradeoff, in order to implement an easier solution to my issue? Or do you still think I should go the two-Heroku-app solution?