[BroZeus]

I recently made a UCP on top of react and nodejs which has server-side rendering too, you can check it out here. As Southclaw said you can use create-react-app to avoid writing/copy-pasting boilerplate code, but my recommendation is to make your first application from the scratch without using such tools, it will help you understand the working of these applications more clearly.

I too moved from php-mysql to nodejs-react and it took me few weeks of grinding to finally understand and get my server-side code working.