Example of deployment process which I use in my Nuxt.js projects. I usually have 3 components running per project: admin SPA, nuxt.js renderer and JSON API.
This manual is relevant for VPS such as DigitalOcean.com or Vultr.com. It's easier to use things like Now for deployment but for most cases VPS gives more flexebillity needed for projects bigger then a landing page.
Let's assume that you have entered fresh installation of Ubuntu instance via SSH. Let's rock:
Depending on size of project you have two choises: make non-root user or go on with root. I'd suggest you to go with root, which is easier (except nginx part). If you have chosen non-root, check out this tutorial.
Using nvm or directly:
sudo apt-get install python-software-properties
curl -sL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_9.x | sudo -E bash -
sudo apt-get install nodejs
It's actually up to you, depending on type of your project, but I usually use this structure:
- user dir (ex., /root)
-
- config.yml (pm2 config)
-
- app (project name)
-
-
- client (nuxt.js files)
-
-
-
- server (API server files)
-
-
-
- public (static content)
-
Fill server dir with your API code, in my case it's nodejs + koa2 + mongoose stack. Place at least favicon and robots.txt to public dir.
If you use enviroment variables (I hope you are), open package.json file and change build script to
"build": "NODE_ENV=production nuxt build -a",
On production build, node.js will pass production flag to your nuxt.config.js. For example, you can make API URL different for dev and prod enviroments and more. Very usefull. (for Windows users, see cross-env package).
Now it's time to make production build. Run npm run build
on your local machine. I don't recommend to build nuxt.js on production server, because it eats lots of memory and causes up to minute of downtime. Take package.json, nuxt.config.js and .nuxt dir and copy them via sftp (or pull from git) to client dir.
Move to your client directory on the server and install production dependencies (in most cases you need only nuxt package): npm i -—production
.
PM2 is a process manager for node.js. I suggest it for newbies, but you can also try things like Passenger. Install PM2 and create config file in your user root dir: config.yml. See config example below.
Install nginx:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install nginx
(If you using root user, you have to set right permissions for project dirs to make it work with static files. Or just change www-data to root in nginx.conf. Duno, it works for me.).
Then edit config file /etc/nginx/sites-available/default, see config example below. Don't forget to sudo nginx -s reload
after every nginx modification.
If you have already connected domain to your project, it's super easy to set up https (and http2). See this tutorial for installing certbot.
Move to dir that contains your pm2 config file and run pm2 start config.yml –-env production
. Yay, everything should work for now, but it doesn't. Run pm2 logs
to see errors. This manual is complicated for a newbie and imperfect itself, so you will probably have to try several times. But it's worth it.
Contributions to this manual are appreciated.