Deploying Express nodejs project on a server with nginx

Here is how I set up and deploy my nodejs project on a remote server. In this setup, I only use basic express routing to run and show the index.html and sample API.

First, you need to install the required libraries to your server, for installation run this command

sudo apt install nginx

sudo apt install nodejs

sudo apt install npm

npm install pm2 -g

After the installation, we can now proceed to set up the project.

Move your project to the server, you can use ftp servers like FileZilla or you can git clone if it is on github

Run command sudo service nginx start and sudo service nginx status to check

Move your project to /var/www/<name_of_project> . run command mv /path/of/the/clone/project /var/www/<name_of_project>

Change the permission of /var/www/<name_of_projkect>/<name_of_folder>. run command
chown -R $USER:$USER /var/www/<name_of_projkect>/<name_of_folder>
chmod -R 755 /var/www/<name_of_projkect>

Add the nginx configuration
nano /etc/nginx/sites-available/<name_of_project>
copy this code

server{
listen 80;
listen [::]:80;
root /var/www/my-project/project;
index index.html index.htm index.nginx-debian.html;
#server_name example.com www.example.com
server_name <ip_address>
location / {
try_files $uri $uri/ =404;
}
}

Link the sites-available to sites-enabled
ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/<name_of_project> /etc/nginx/sites-enabled

Last step we need to make sure that the server needs to run in the background and PM2 is all we need.
Locate your project in /var/www/<name_of_project>/<name_of_project> and run this command
pm2 start <name_of_server_file>