# Own your Setup for Side Projects Let's start by talking about side projects, we all start them and some of us finish a few too 😛. But most of the side projects are for fun/PoC and end up getting deployed on free services like Heroku/Glitch for backend or Vercel/Netlify for frontend. And those are a great set of services to start with, in fact, tools that host static sites rarely ask for money for features like 100% uptime (duh!) and SSL for custom domains, but for services that hosts your servers for you, sooner or later will find a way to ask for money. Context switching closer to the post title, recently one of my Node Servers which was hosted on Heroku (surviving on [GitHub Student Pack Credits](https://education.github.com/pack) ❤ on Hobby Plan) lost the ability to use SSL with a custom domain 😟, as Heroku doesn't allow you to use a custom domain with SSL on free plans. This was a trigger and I decided to take an EC2 instance (you can take a similar machine on GCP, Azure, DigitalOcean, etc.) and set up all my servers there themselves with custom domains (yes! with SSL). ## Let's begin! ### ☁ Setup your EC2 Instance (or similar instances) 1. Make an AWS account and get a free tier VM, I have suggested some options below: - **AMI** -> Ubuntu Server 20.04 LTS (HVM), SSD Volume Type (64-bit (x86)) - **Instance Type** -> Choose `t2.micro` - **Rest is almost default** which is 8GB storage & 1GB RAM - Also, you can whitelist Traffic Type, Port and IPs in Security Group Step and Launch the Instance. 2. Generate a key pair and download the `pem` file and store it safely. 3. To connect to your VM using SSH, you now need to run a command like ```sh ssh -i "my.pem" ubuntu@ ``` That almost wraps part of the things we will do in the browser. 🙆🏻‍♂️ ### **[BONUS] ✨ Connect from VS Code** - Add an entry in your `~/.ssh/config` as below: ```yaml Host machineName User ubuntu HostName IdentityFile ``` - Install [Remote-SSH](https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ms-vscode-remote.remote-ssh) - Press Ctrl/Cmd + Shift + P and write `Connect to Host` - Select `machineName` and it's done! 🤝🏻 ### 📦 Configure your machine - First things first, the machine comes with Ubuntu 20, but we might need more stuff, so lets update the package lists ```sh sudo apt-get update ``` - Next is I'll recommend creating a separate folder and then clone the repos you want to host. - For ease generate SSH Key and add it to GitHub, for generation use these commands and output is your public SSH Key. ```sh ssh-keygen -t ed25519 -C "your-github-email" eval "$(ssh-agent -s)" ssh-add ~/.ssh/id_ed25519 cat ~/.ssh/id_ed25519.pub ``` - Now install all the dependencies that you'll need (unless using docker images), I'll show a few below - Node 14.x ```bash curl -sL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_14.x -o nodesource_setup.sh sudo bash nodesource_setup.sh sudo apt install -y nodejs node -v ``` - pm2 (process manager for keeping your servers running) ```shell sudo npm i -g pm2 ``` ### ⚒ Install nginx & certbot - [nginx or NginX](https://www.nginx.com/), is a web server that can also be used as a reverse proxy, load balancer, mail proxy, and HTTP cache. We'll quickly install and enable it. ```sh sudo apt install nginx sudo systemctl enable nginx sudo systemctl start nginx ``` - **certbot** 🤖 is a tool which generates free & legit SSL Certs 🔐 using [LetsEncrypt](https://letsencrypt.org/getting-started/), it also has features auto-renew. We'll install certbot service and nginx plugin for the same ```sh sudo apt-get install certbot # for certbot sudo apt-get install python3-certbot-nginx # for python plugin ``` We are all ready with dependencies, now we'll move to the final steps. ### 👨🏻‍💻 Starting your applications and Adding Domains - Now you need to start your servers either on `gunicorn` or `pm2` as per your need. To start with pm2, say your program starts with `npm run start`, then use ```sh pm2 start "npm run start" --name "your-api" ``` At this stage if your API runs on say port `1337`, you can access the API at `http://:1337` Now let's add the domain to it. For that first, you need to make a DNS Record Entry. ``` Type: A Name: `@`(if you want to use domain) else `subdomain` Value: TTL: as per your requirement ``` Once this entry is created, now we need to generate SSL Cert and Private key on our side. Generate a certificate for your domain/subdomain using the command below and answer the prompts as needed ```sh sudo certbot certonly --nginx ``` This command finished by creating two files at ``` /etc/letsencrypt/live//fullchain.pem /etc/letsencrypt/live//privkey.pem ``` Now let's set up Nginx for your server Suppose you want to run your server running on 1337 port on `your-domain`, then ```sh cd /etc/nginx/sites-available nano your-domain.conf ``` Now few things, we first create the file in `sites-available` so that we don't mess up directly with nginx, once we test the config, then we create a soft link to the same in `sites-enabled` which is where nginx looks up while mapping requests. In your-domain.conf, add the following content and replace `` ``` server { listen 80; listen 443 ssl; server_name ; ssl_certificate /etc/letsencrypt/live//fullchain.pem; ssl_certificate_key /etc/letsencrypt/live//privkey.pem; location / { proxy_pass http://localhost:1337; 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; } } ``` Now let's make a soft link as promised ``` cd /etc/nginx/sites-enabled sudo ln -s ../sites-available/your-domain.conf . ``` After you are done with this, let's test our conf file ✅ ``` sudo nginx -t ``` if all is well, you can signal nginx to reload configs ``` sudo nginx -s reload ``` Now your API can be accessed at `your-domain` 🎉 So, you have completed a one-time setup of your EC2 instance and deployed one of your APIs on a custom domain. In the same way, you can add as many side projects as you want to the same machine and redirect internally to another port.