Connecting to Digital Ocean and Launching a Node.js Website

I. What is Digital Ocean

I. Creating a Droplet

I. Connecting to the Droplet

I. Cloning a Repo

III. Starting and Stopping Your Site

II. Adding Your Domain Name

III. Adding "www" to Your URL

What is Digital Ocean / SSH

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Digital Ocean is a hosting service which allows us to put our code online and launch our web application for the whole world to see.

So what about these questions?

• What is a server?
• Can a computer be a server?
• Are we able to connect to another computer remotely?
• Can we connect to a server remotely?

A server is a computer that servers up data. We can access computers remotely so we must be able to access server. That's what we're doing now, building a connection to a server powered by Digital Ocean.

A server is a computer that:

• acts as a central interface for data
• manages interaction between clients / computers

SSH is a UNIX command we use to log into another computer via the terminal over a network. It allows us to execute commands remotely!

Creating a Droplet

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• Run the following command to copy your ssh key from your terminal. pbcopy will automatically copy the key

pbcopy < ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub  

• Log into your Diginal Ocean account > Settings > Security > Add SSH Key
  • You can make the name anything you would like it to be and you can include more than one SSH key
• Log into your Digital Ocean account and click on "Droplets"
• Click "Create Droplet" the green button on the top
• Name your Droplet and choose from a select size.
• You don't need to check of anything in Available Settings
• Region = USA, unless you're somewhere else? o.O
• Select Ubuntu
• Do not add SSH keys
• Digital Ocean will send you an e-mail with the initial login information

Connecting to the Droplet

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• Look into the email you got from Digital ocean. It will contain a password and IP address.

ssh root@YOUR-IP-ADDRESS

• Lets run a quick update
• apt-get is a repository that manages the installation of packages for Ubuntu
  • Like what brew does for OSX
  • Like what npm does for node

apt-get update

• Now install what you need for your app. The below code installs git and node for us to use.

apt-get install git

apt-get install nodejs

apt-get install nodejs-legacy

apt-get install npm

Cloning your repo

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• If you logged out of your droplet, SSH back into your Digital Ocean server. The command should look something like

ssh [email protected]

• You should be in the home section of the root user.
• Now create a directory and connect the repo you plan to pull from

git init
git remote add origin HTTPSlinkfromrepo
git pull origin master

Starting and Stopping Your Site

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Start server regularly

node server.js -p80

• You should be able to go to your domain name or ip address now in a web browser
• The "-p80" prevents the user from having to type ":8080" at the end of the url
• Once you close your terminal your server will stop and your site will not be live

Start server in the background

nohup node server.js -p80 &

• nohup - allows you to continue working in your terminal because it runs the process in the background
• & - this tells your DO box to continue running the process even when your terminal disconnects
• Your site will be live whether your terminal is connected or not, your computer is on or off

Stop your server

• If you started your server regularly you could just exit or ctrl+c it
• If you nohup'd your server use the following command to find the process number

ps aux | grep server

• ps aux - gives the entire command line of the processes which are searched
• grep - will search any process that is running that contains the word you put after it
• You can also run other words after grep such as "nohup," "node," and the like
• Now take the process number for the server that is running and input the following command

kill -9 processnumber

• Your site is no longer up
• You can also remove your nohup.out log file as well. This was created when you first ran the nohup command

rm nohup.out

DNS - Adding your domain name

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• Go to the DNS tab
• If you bought a domain you can add it under the "Add a Domain" section
• Select your newly created droplet from the drop down menu
• Click "Create Domain"
• Depending on where you bought your domain from you need to go to that original site
• Change your Domain Name Server information to the links next to the "NS" tab on the DNS Digital Ocean page
• Apply these changes and it can take up to 24-48 hours to complete

Adding "www" in Front of Your URL

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• Go to your domain on the DNS tab of Digital Ocean
• Select "Add Record" - the big ass blue button
• Seclect "CNAME" from the list that appears
• The first box with "Enter Name" please put "www"
• The second box with "Enter Hostname" please put "yourdomain.com"
• This will allow users to go to your site whether they input your domain with or without the "www" in front of it