Introduction

Thus far in this book, you have learned a lot about building client-side React applications, that is, applications where the (transpiled) React code executes in the browsers of your website visitors.

This makes sense because React was originally created to simplify the process of building interactive and reactive UIs by running JavaScript code on the client side. To this date, most React features, including the ones covered up to this point in this book (e.g., state, context, and routing), exist to fulfill this purpose.

But, as you will learn in this and the following chapters, you can actually also execute React code on the server side. There are certain React features that may only be used there—for example, React Server Components, which will be covered in great detail in the Chapter 16, React Server Components & Server Actions.

This chapter will get you started with React on the server side, briefly explain what server-side rendering (SSR) is...