Full Node.js Deployment - NGINX, SSL With Lets Encrypt

[Music] hey what's going on guys in this video I'm going to show you how to fully deploy an ojs and Express application and we're also going to use nginx as a reverse proxy so that we can access it through port 80 which is the port for HTTP and then in addition to that we're going to add a domain name and we're going to create a or install an SSL certificate using let's encrypt a free SSL certificate all right so we're gonna do quite a bit here and we're gonna be using digitalocean as our host it's it's a cloud hosting service service that I use all the time that I highly recommend and they have a gist file in the description that has pretty much all the stuff that we're gonna be doing along with the commands and then there's also a link to get $10 free from digitalocean so you don't have to pay anything - if you want to follow along and do this with me alright so the app we're gonna deploy is very very simple you can see I already have it on github - just called it node app and it's just a single app.js file in fact I'll show it to you in vs code so basically it's just the simplest Express application you could build we just brought an Express created a route that outputs an h1 and it listens on port 5,000 and if I want to run it locally I can just say node and then app J s which is the file name you can see it's running and I can run it on my local host and there it is okay so nothing spectacular but obviously you would replace this with your application so this is just for an example so I'm just gonna stop that alright now of course you want your your code on github either as a public or private repository because that's how we're gonna get it on to our server so I'm going to jump over to digitalocean and you can sign up you can use that link that that's in the gist and you'll get $10 free so once you sign up you can create a droplet and I'm gonna choose Ubuntu here 18.04 is my operating system and I'll choose the $10 plan here different plans have different you know CPU and disk size and stuff like that and then let's see we'll just leave the default region as far as authentication you can use either a one-time password where you can use that I think they'll email it to you and then you can change it or you can set up some SSH keys which I already have set up I'm not gonna go over the process of generating SSH keys I do have an SSH crash course if you want to check that out if I remember I'll put the link in the description but I'm just gonna use my iMac SSH which is what I'm on now and then just change the hostname to let's say node app and that's it we can just go ahead and create our droplet if you're not familiar with digitalocean a droplet is just a server it's just like it's just like an empty Linux server that you can install absolutely whatever you want on and I've done a bunch of videos deploying to Heroku which is a great service as well it makes things much easier however you don't have the type of freedom you have with you know your own Linux server like this alright so that's set up now we have our IP address right here for our droplet so I'm going to copy that and open up a terminal and I'm gonna go ahead and SSH on sshh but SSH and I'm gonna use the root user at and then the IP address okay so we'll just say yes to this and then we should get logged in alright so you can see now we're logged into our server or our droplet so I'm just going to clear this up now if you're actually pushing to production you know you're building a real application deploying it I would suggest creating a new user not using the root user however I'm just gonna use root for our convenience and just to save some time okay so first thing we want to do is update our packages so let's do sudo and I know I'm using root so I don't actually have to use sudo but you know it's just in case or not I'll just use it anyway so I'll say sudo apt update which is going to update our packages and then after that we want to install node because we don't have node installed by default if I say no - - version you'll see that it's not in and it tells us to run app to install node.js now before we run this in order to get the latest version we actually need to add the repository so if we go back to that gist file I actually have the link right here and this will allow us to install node version 12 which is the latest version at this time so I'm gonna grab that okay so it's a curl command we're gonna paste that in and run it and then we should be able to install the latest version of node by doing sudo apt and again I know I don't have to use sudo here so sudo apt install and then nodejs yes and what this will do is it'll install node on our server and NPM so if I clear this out and now I do NPM - - version you can see we have that installed and we also have node installed I'm just going to make this a little bigger yeah all right so we'll clear that up so now we have NPM in node installed on our server so the next thing we want to do is get our application on to our server so usually what I'll do is CD in to our home directory and then create like an apps folder so we'll CD into apps and then from here I'm gonna run get clone and then go to my github where I have my application and right here where it says clone or download you can use SSH but you'll have to set up SSH keys on your server or with github so I'm going to just use HTTPS so I'll just copy this link here and then we'll go over and just paste that in and run it and what should happen well first we have to enter github info because I didn't use SSH okay so now if I do an LS which will list the directory contents you'll see that we have node app so I'll CD into node - app and if I do an LS here you'll see that we have our application files now we don't have our dependencies installed notices no node modules folder so we have to run npm install and that'll look at the package dot jason and install whatever dependencies there are in this particular application we only have express as a dependency alright so so now that we have our dependencies installed we we should be able to run the application with actually I don't think I have a start script so we can just say node and then app dot J s which is the name of the entry file and you can see it's listening on five thousand and at this point we should be able to copy our IP address for the droplet and we should be able to go to ports five thousand and there it is so it is live right now but it's still it's not set up the way we want it to be obviously we don't want people to go to port five thousand so that's where nginx comes in but before we do that we have to install something called PM - so let me just go to the PM - website here so PM 2 is a process manager basically it's going to run our node application in a production environment as a process as a background process instead of having it just linger in the terminal like this obviously this is an you know we don't want to keep it like this so I'm going to stop this with ctrl C and the way that we install PM 2 is with NPM so we're gonna say npm install and we want to install it globally so - G and then PM - all right and then we can use PM 2 to start our application and manage it alright so clear that up and while we're inside the application folder let's run PM two starts and then the name of the file so basically instead of running node app KS we're running p.m. to start app Jas and you can see that now our application is running okay so it's online it shows the CPU it's using memory and stuff like that and the terminal is freed up so basically it's just running in the background and it should still work if I go back to that IP address and reload you can see our app is is running all right now there's different commands we have like p.m. to status and you can look all this up in the documentation this will show you all your apps that are running if we wanted to let's say restart our application we could do p.m. - and then app or we want to do p.m. to restart app j/s and that will restart it we could do p.m. to stop app j/s and I'll have a bunch of commands in that gist file we can also look at logs so we can do p.m. to logs and what this does is it actually just kind of runs a stream of logs this app listening on port 5,000 comes from this right here so any console logs are going to show up here and then we can get out of this with control C and if we want to flush our logs or clear our logs we can do p.m. - flush and now if I do p.m. to logs you'll see that they're the logs have been flushed okay so just some of the commands that you can use now we want to make sure that our application goes back up if the server reboots so there's a command that we have to run for that and that's p.m. to startup abun - alright so now if you look right here what it did is it made a script for booting at startup so even if I reboot the server like we can say reboot it's gonna close our connection because the droplet is actually rebooting and it might take a second before we can go back in but once we go back in it should still be running so let's go ahead and try it's okay and now if we do p.m. to status our application is running and I can go over here and reload and it's still running all right so we have that part taken care of now before we get into nginx I would suggest enabling the firewall so if we do ufw status you'll see that it's inactive so I'm actually going to enable the firewall I'm gonna say ufw enable so it's going to say may command may disrupt existing SSH connections I will say yes and then we're going to allow SSH by saying ufw enable SSH I'm sorry not enable allow allow SSH okay so now if we do ufw which is our firewall and we check out status you'll see that port 22 is open it's allowed because that's the port for SSH which is what we're using right now okay now if I go back to the browser and reload it's not good it's no longer gonna work because port 5000 is closed in fact everything is closed right now we have our firewall up all right so I don't even want port 5000 to be to be able to be accessed we're gonna set up nginx so that it goes through port 80 which is the standard HTTP port so what we do want to do is allow port 80 which we can just actually just say HTTP and then we also want to allow HTTP which is port 443 so if I do ufw status you can see that now port 80 and 443 are allowed ok so now that we've done that we've set up a basic firewall and there's a lot more security things you can get into but that's some you know I'm not going to get into those specifics now we want to do a set up nginx so that we can actually access our application with just this IP like this ok this should be able to access our so to do that we need to install nginx so we're gonna say sudo apt install nginx and for those of you that aren't familiar with nginx it's a web server it's it's similar to Apache if you've ever dealt with Apache we're gonna do a little configuration but not not much at all so nginx is now installed what we want to do in fact if I reload you'll see it will say welcome to nginx it's just kind of the landing page what we want to do is go to the gist here and we want to edit let's see so we're right here we just installed nginx now we want to edit this sites available slash default file and you can open this with any editor I'm using Nano if you want to use vim that's fine as well Nano is a lot easier to use for those of you that haven't that haven't don't have experience with vim so I'm gonna go ahead and paste that in and run it it's going to open up the file and we just want to go down a page down to the server block here so we have this listen on port 80 we're gonna leave all this stuff and go down to this location area right here so in this location let's see I'm just gonna I'm gonna get rid of this and then if I go back to the gist file you're gonna see this right here location and we want to put this stuff in that location block and this is where it's it's basically setting up that reverse proxy so that when we go to port 80 it's gonna load our app that's running on port 5000 on our local machine which is good which is obviously our server so I'm gonna copy this stuff that's in the location and then I'm just gonna go ahead and we should be able to just paste that in right here server name we you can leave it like this but if you're gonna use a domain name you want to put that here so I'm gonna be using Travis II media dot site as my domain just for this video and then I also want to put the www version okay you don't want to use this you want to use whatever domain you want to use if you want to use a domain alright so that should be all we need to do here so I'm gonna go ahead and command our control X and it's gonna ask if we want to save I'll say yes enter and now that should be saved now we can check and make sure nginx is is okay by saying sudo and Gen X - T and it says that the configuration file is okay test is successful all right so everything should be okay now we want to restart the service so we're gonna say service nginx restart okay so that should restart it now let's go back to the browser and let's reload our IP address and there it is as our node application running on port 80 it's running on five thousand but we're using nginx basically in front of it as a reverse proxy to to access it through port 80 okay we can't even go to port 5,000 it's just gonna you know it's not gonna work all right so that's setup so now we want to add the domain and like I said I'm gonna be using Traverse immediate site which I have registered right here at Namecheap Namecheap is is a great service I suggest for registering domains I actually have an affiliate link right here if you're interested if you're gonna buy a domain that'll give me a little kick back I'll appreciate that basically before we do anything here with a Namecheap we need to go to digitalocean and go to over here on the side networking and we want to add the domain whatever domain you're gonna use you want to add here so I'm gonna put in Travis e-media site and add domain okay now there's two things we want to add here we want to add to a records for this domain so one is for the root which we use a an @ symbol for and we can choose a droplet that we want this to basically point to and we're going to use our node app so we're going to create that record and then we also want the WWV version 2.2 note app create the record okay so that's all we have to do on the digital ocean side now on your registrar whether it's Namecheap or I don't know GoDaddy or wherever you register your domains you're gonna want to add the digitalocean name servers so name cheeps pretty easy you have this area right here by default it should say basic DNS but we want to choose custom DNS and we want to add NS 1 . digitalocean comm for the first one and then i'm just going to copy this we want three of these but we want NS 1 and then n s 2 and then NS 3 and then we'll click the little green checkmark here ok so that should change the name servers now this might take a little while to propagate so it's it can be different all right here it says up to 48 hours to take effect usually it's not that long sometimes it's right away I don't really know what you know what causes it to take a longer amount of time or not but let's go ahead and just see what happens if we do go to Travis su media dot site probably nothing yeah so it's just the name cheap alright you know what I'm gonna do guys is you know we're gonna do is just pause the video and wait until this propagates hopefully it's not 48 hours I have a feeling it'll be like 10 minutes or so but I'm gonna pause the video and when this propagates I will come back and then we'll go ahead and do the SSL certificate alright guys so luckily that didn't take too long was about 15 minutes or so so you can see that travesty media dot site is now going to the note application if I use the www version same thing alright so our application is deployed now we just want to add an SSL using let's encrypt which is pretty easy so let's jump in back into the terminal here make sure you're in your server and if you look at the gist file I have all the commands laid out for you so right here basically we want to add the PPA so we want to be able to add the repository here so I'm gonna copy this and I'll just paste that in okay it's go ahead and hit enter here and then once that's done let's just run an update so sudo apt update okay so now we want to install let's see right here we want to install this Python cert bot nginx so we're gonna grab that and paste that in yes okay once that's done we can go ahead and add our certificate now you're gonna want to use whatever domain you're using so let's clear that up and I'm just gonna change to change these see media dot site and let's also change this dot site okay so I'll run that it's gonna ask for an email address and we want to agree to the Terms of Service we'd be willing to share your email address let's say no okay so it's obtaining a new certificate waiting for verification cleaning up challenges as you can see how easy this is deploying certificate let's see so this is where we want to decide if we want to automatically redirect to HTTPS or not I'm gonna say yes so I'm going to choose option - meaning that it'll always be HTTPS so now let's go back to our site and reload and now you can see it no longer says not secure we now have a secure connection we have a valid certificate so it's as easy as that now these certificates will expire automatic spire automatically after 90 days but there is a command we can run to basically test the renewal process so we can do that with start thought and we want to do renew and let's do - - dry run okay all right I should say it'll automatically renew after 90 days but we're gonna test that here so renewing existing certificate performing changes waiting for verifications basically it's doing the same thing and this should run every 90 days so we just kind of did a simulation of a renewal congratulations all renewals succeeded alright so that's it we now have a node.js application on running on digitalocean we use PM 2 as our process manager there's other ones as well you have forever I prefer p.m. - then we used nginx as a reverse proxy so that we can access it through port 80 then we added a domain name and then we add an SSL with let's encrypt and everything I did is in this gist file so you can kind of use this as a guide for future projects alright thanks guys hopefully you enjoyed this and I'll see you next time

Channel: Traversy Media

Views: 234,368

Rating: 4.9776883 out of 5

Keywords: node.js, node.js deployment, lets encrypt, node nginx, node pm2, digital ocean, node.js digital ocean

Id: oykl1Ih9pMg

Length: 23min 47sec (1427 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 23 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/erulabs]

I've been working on a CLI tool that more or less does all of this in a modern way: deploy-node-app - no SSHing required :P

[u/YOUREABOT]

Just awesome. Thank u

[u/asb14690]

Thanks! Good project to learn node js.

[u/AroXAlpha]

Thank you very much for the amazing video. This helped me a lot. However, I am interested how/why you configured the name space A entries. What does these mean?