The BEN Stack - Bubble, Express, Node

Hey all,

I’ve been a huge fan of building in what I’m calling the BEN stack: using Bubble for all “straightforward” functionality like frontend, login, and database, and then using an Express/Node app to do backend functionality that Bubble can’t handle.

I’m trying to put this stack through its paces, so I’m curious if any of you have any apps that are running into limitations. Here are a few examples of things I’m building that use the stack:

  • an API doesn’t return data in the way we need it to, so build a custom API wrapper in Express to reformat the data to pull into Bubble
  • needing to scrape a website as part of a workflow using a virtual browser (user provides link, we scrape it and return certain elements to Bubble)
  • API intensive apps that rely on cron jobs: every 60 seconds, keep this service outside of Bubble up to date (calendar, app, email, etc)
  • workflow action that creates a separate hosted HTML/CSS page (landing page generator) running on a node server that a user can hook up to a custom domain with an IP address
  • Building embeddable apps that don’t run into iFrame cross-origin issues

Here’s a more in-depth example of how I built NotionMetrics, which taps into a few of these: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dVGbrLF7sEo

7 Likes

Super interested in this point. I’ll check out the video!

Curious to know more about your setup for this!

Let me know if you have any questions! I don’t think I cover all of the details in the video, but for Notion embeds I had to go with the Puppeteer screen capture to render image approach.

This one was pretty complex. To get SSL working properly and provide a user with an A Record to set their domain to, you end up needing to program a node server to automatically update with some shell scripts.

I’m thinking about making some videos about it because the end result is pretty cool. Will keep you posted!

2 Likes

Did you end up doing a few videos?