How to deploy your Nodejs app to an AWS ec2 instance

This readme covers the basics of manually deploying your application to AWS ECS instance and enable reverses proxy with Nginx as the load balancer

Getting Started

To get started, create an account with AWS, After the successful creation of your account goto your AWS dashboard the following the instructions.

Click on Launch Virtual Machine with EC2

Next client select your Amazon Machine Image (AMI). In my case, I'm using Ubuntu Server 18.04LTS on the next step, just select review and launch to create the instance

Once you press the launch button, the service will ask you to select a key pair, this will be your ssh key. Kindly select create a new key pair, then you'll be prompt to enter the name of the key pair. Enete a name and download it. When that's done, launch the instance you'll be able to view the details of the instance.With that said, you should get a page that looks like this

Copy the pem file from your download path to your ~/.ssh directory cp ./YourPathToYour.pem file ~/.ssh then run chmod 400 ~/.ssh/your.pem file to restrict public access to your ssh key.

run the following ssh -i ~/.ssh/your.pem ubuntu@{IP_Address}, you should get something like this.Congrats, you've successfully logged into your EC2 instance

Up Next: Hosting Your App

Follow the proceeding steps to deploying your application

Run vagrant up

SSH into the frontend_server by runing vagrant ssh frontend_server

sudo apt-get update

Run sudo apt-get install -y avahi-daemon libnss-mdns

sudo apt-get install git -y creates a network layer for your front-end and backend server to work together

curl -sL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_10.x | sudo -E bash - this will Install the standard Debian/Ubuntu packages for Node and npm

sudo apt-get install -y nodejs

sudo npm install -y node-gyp -g node-gyp is a tool which compiles Node.js Addons. Node.js Addons are native Node.js Modules, written in C or C++, which therefore need to be compiled on your machine

git clone https://github.com/andela/metis-ah-frontend.git sims_project

cd sims_project

npm i

npm run build

npm start

Goto http://YourPublicDNS:3000

Keeping the app awake

Your application will continue to run as long as you have the terminal open. What happens when you stop the process? You're right, the application stops running. We're going to keep the application running by installing pm2 - PM2 is a process manager for node that allows you to keep your application running forever.

• Start by killing all node process by running killall -9 node
• install PM2 npm install pm2 -g
• Run pm2 start npm --name "<name_the_process_anything_you_want>" -- start this will run the build and start the server
• Run pm2 startup which output a script on the browser which you need to run
• Run pm2 save this will keep the server running