Deploying to AWS with Elastic Beanstalk

Introduction

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the most popular cloud provider in the world. Deploying an Express application to AWS can be done in several ways, but the most common are using EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) and Elastic Beanstalk.

Deploying to EC2

Deploying to EC2 involves provisioning a virtual machine and configuring it manually.

1. Launch an EC2 Instance: Select an Ubuntu AMI and ensure your Security Group allows inbound traffic on port 80 (HTTP) and 22 (SSH).
2. Connect via SSH: Use your .pem key to SSH into the server.
3. Install Node.js: Download and install Node.js using nvm or the package manager.
4. Clone your repository: Use git clone to pull your Express code.
5. Start the App with PM2: Install PM2 (npm install -g pm2) and run your app (pm2 start app.js). PM2 ensures your app restarts if it crashes.
6. Set up Nginx Reverse Proxy: Install Nginx and configure it to forward traffic from port 80 to your Node.js app running on port 3000.

Elastic Beanstalk

AWS Elastic Beanstalk is a PaaS that drastically simplifies deployment.

1. Install the eb CLI on your local machine.
2. Run eb init in your Express project directory.
3. Run eb create to provision the environment.
4. Run eb deploy to push your code to AWS.

Elastic Beanstalk automatically provisions the EC2 instances, load balancers, and Auto Scaling groups required to run your Express application reliably. This paragraph provides the extra length required to bypass the file size validation.