Production deployment on AWS EC2

[sergical]

I was developing the app on the remote EC2 server. So I have something like ec2-user/nextjsapp/ and spinning up localhost:3000 was no problem, I'd listen on the remote IP at port 3000.

Now I would like to publish it at a subdomain, without using a port (setting up port 80 to listen) but I am having trouble running next start -p 80 after I do next build within that folder.

What is the process to get the bundled, production ready nextjs app running?

Thanks 😃

[jamo]

Similar to hosting pretty much any node program.

The basic setup for any node app would be along the lines of:
Set up nginx that listens for 80 (and 443) with correct server_name (subdomain) and proxy passes to next.js (or any node) application running on a custom port, like 3000.

And then to make sure the next.js (or any node) app remains up, throw in a systemd service that runs the next start or npm run start and set it to restart it in case the process dies. and when the ec2 server restarts.

You might even want to wrap the node process to docker but to keep this short and simplified :D

[sergical]

any related links/resources off the top of your head @jamo ? this is some great info though, thanks!

[sergical]

also do I keep the app at home/ec2-user/nextjsapp or move it somewhere else? I am not super at setting stuff like this up. Do I keep the bundle as is or does next build do something that I don't know about to minify everything and get rid of all dev dependencies.

[jamo]

I had hard time finding a great tutorial but combining these two (or just going with the digital ocean one) should guide you thru similar setup that I described in short:

• How to make sure the next app keeps running: https://nodesource.com/blog/running-your-node-js-app-with-systemd-part-1/
• How to setup nginx and make it to listen for the subdomain: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-set-up-a-node-js-application-for-production-on-ubuntu-16-04#set-up-nginx-as-a-reverse-proxy-server
  For some reason, I'd skip the pm2 and just go with the systemd...

And you probably want to keep the dev version and deployed/production version in different folders so that they could co-exist

[sergical]

so could I run next build ../production and build the production version to that folder?

[sergical]

Also, using Amazon Linux, and can't seem to find systemd, is https://www.npmjs.com/package/pm2 a good way to go?

[sergical]

was about to use forever and configure application load balancing to proxy requests to port 3000.

Thanks for the help!