How to Deploy a Nodejs Application on an AWS EC2 Server?

3 min readJan 10, 2022

Deployment_Nodejs

Full deployment of Node.js using PM2 and an NGINX reverse proxy and a free SSL from Lets Encrypt to an AWS EC2 instance

What is Amazon EC2 Instance?

An EC2 instance is nothing but a virtual server in Amazon Web services terminology. It stands for Elastic Compute Cloud. It is a web service where an AWS subscriber can request and provision a compute server in the AWS cloud.

Create EC2 Instance in AWS

Login to your AWS account and go to the AWS Services tab at the top left corner.
Open all the services and click on EC2 under Compute services. This will launch the dashboard of EC2.
On the top right corner of the EC2 dashboard, choose the AWS Region in which you want to provision the EC2 server.
Click on the ‘Launch Instance’ button in the section of Create Instance.
Choose AMI(Amazon Machine Image)
Choose EC2 Instance Types
Configure Instance
Add Storage
Tag Instance
Configure Security Groups
Review Instances and select the key if it is existing if not create a new key for your EC2 instance.
Launch instance

Connect the EC2 instance Server ( Ubuntu using SSH )

chmod 400 <your pem key name>
ssh -i <your pem key name> ubuntu@<Public DNS> OR ssh -i <your pem key name> ec2-user@<Public DNS>

Install Node JS

sudo apt install curl
Then for the Latest release, add this PPA.. curl -sL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_10.x | sudo bash - To install the LTS release, use this PPA curl -sL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_8.x | sudo bash -
sudo apt install nodejs
node -v *npm -v

Install MongoDB

sudo apt-key adv --keyserver hkp://keyserver.ubuntu.com:80 --recv EA312927
echo "deb http://repo.mongodb.org/apt/ubuntu xenial/mongodb-org/3.2 multiverse" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/mongodb-org-3.2.list
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install -y --allow-unauthenticated mongodb-org OR sudo apt-get install -y mongodb-org
sudo systemctl start mongod
sudo systemctl status mongod
sudo systemctl enable mongod

Install Git on Ubuntu

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install git
git --version

Clone the Repository

git clone <Repository Path>

Test Application

test your application, run with the following command:

node <app starting js file name> or npm start

Once you have confirmed the application is working, kill the application with CTRL+C.

Install & Configure PM2

sudo npm install -g pm2
sudo pm2 start /path/<your application starting file name where you defining your port> default app it should be sudo pm2 start /application path/./bin/www
check using <your puplic ip>:<your application port> in your browser. your application is running.

Install Nginx

Since this is our first interaction with the apt packaging system in this session, we will update our local package index so that we have access to the most recent package listings.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install nginx
check-in your browser enter you will get Welcome to Nginx screen

Set Up Nginx as a Reverse Proxy

Now that your application is running and listening on localhost, you need to make it so people from the outside world can access it. To achieve this, we will use Nginx as a reverse proxy.

First, you need to update the /etc/nginx/sites-available/default configuration file. Open the file with this command: cd /etc/nginx/sites-available sudo vi default

instead of this, you can also use the nano command to open your configuration file:

sudo nano /etc/nginx/sites-available/default

Within the server block, find the location/section. Replace the contents of the block with the following configuration:

location / {
proxy_pass http://localhost:**<your port number>**;
proxy_http_version 1.1;
proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade;
proxy_set_header Connection 'upgrade';
proxy_set_header Host $host;
proxy_cache_bypass $http_upgrade;
}