As I see it you want explanation for a monorepo structure.
About the questions:
#1
Do you split by client/ and server/ ?
If the /server provides HTML and other static content to the /client in your full stack project, it makes more sense to do it differently. For example like this:
Think of the /src folder as the /server folder, and /public as /client.
#2
Do you have two node_modules/ directories and two respective
package.json, one for client and other for server?
We are working in a monorepo and all our modules are nested. Due to our project structure, the front-end is not free anyway, so there is no need for a separate node_modules and package.json.
#3
If you split them, where do you put the templates/ and views/ used by the
server to generate html code to the client?
We did not separate them. So all the workers goes to /src. Only the static part goes into /public.
What is the problem, and what is going on?
- Monorepo: For example we have a very busy social media application. Users upload millions of photos every day. In order to deliver this seamlessly, we need to scale up our servers. We chose horizontal scaling as the solution. But what is the problem? Problem: We wanted to scale up only the photo serving/uploading part, but due to our structure we had to scale everything at additional expense. So let's say there were no new members coming to our application, so that part was comfortable, but we scaled it up for no reason.
- Node/Express to serve static files: is just a bad idea. You should not use your application server (especially express) to serve static content like html, css, js and other libraries. The best way to serve them is via a content distribution netwrok (CDN). Or, serve then from your web server (nginx or apache).
- Unnecessary confusion: As you can see, everything is very complicated, and the modules are interconnected. Testing, sharing, working with the team are all very difficult. If we want to make a small change in our structure in the future, it may take a lot of effort.
How could it be better?
First you have to completely separate the frontend and the backend. You can use Express just as an API server. And you can use frameworks like React, VueJs, Angular for frontend. It doesn't matter, it can be plain JS/CSS/HTML too. And you can use servers like Nginx or Apache to serve them.
Try to adapt your projects to microservices architecture. Microservices architecture will both reduce complexity and provide convenience for you in any future structure changes. And it is easy to test. On this road, Docker can be a very good friend to you.
If you still want to stay in the monorepo architecture after everything, you can stay using the way I mentioned in About the questions section, there is no problem with it and in addition, it is useful to read this blog.
