Configure Digital Ocean for ssl (https) for free, (Bonus Meteor setup) — Video Series Part 5

3 min readOct 4, 2016

In this section, we will configure Nginx and the meteor server to work together. This is Part 5in the entire video series — you can find the previous parts here.. Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4.

Here is the video for part 5.

Step 1: Set up your custom domain

Go to your domain registrar and update your nameservers to point to

ns1.digitalocean.com
ns2.digitalocean.com
ns3.digitalocean.com

This is what the iwantmyname settings look like:

Back on Digital Ocean add your domain name to your DNS records:

Now, create a new A record with the name of @ and your IP address like so:

Step 2: Ports and Redirects with nginx

let’s forward our domain to a different port number since nginx is listening on port 80. We’ll use port 3000. Create and edit a new file with:

sudo nano /etc/nginx/sites-available/default

Then past this block into that file:

server {
    listen 80;
    server_name game.coolmoviebites.com
    # YOURDOMAIN.com;
    access_log /var/log/nginx/app.dev.access.log;
    error_log /var/log/nginx/app.dev.error.log;
        location / {
            proxy_pass http://XXX.XXX.XX.XXX:3000;
            proxy_http_version 1.1;
            proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade;
            proxy_set_header Connection 'upgrade';
            proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $remote_addr;
        }}

Save and exit this file. Next, we’ll add a small security measure by hiding our nginx version number. Run,

sudo nano /etc/nginx/nginx.conf

Find and uncomment the line with

server_tokens off;

Save and exit this file. Then run:

sudo service nginx restart

To test the change, open a new terminal window and run:

curl -I http://www.yourdomain.com

In my case, it will be http://coolmoviebites.com

The top line should read “HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently.”

When you try to access your page, you should get:

502 Bad Gateway

This means that the server is correctly redirecting to http://localhost:3000 (just like in our dev environments) but as we haven’t yet deployed our meteor app, we get a 502 html error.

Step 3: Using mupx to deploy your app.

Install Meteor Up

npm install -g mupx

Now, switch to your projects root directory and initialize mup.

cd ~/mup-your-project-name
mup init

This should create two files: mup.json and settings.json. Open mup.json and under the servers block, put in your details:

// Server authentication info
"servers": [
    {
        // the domain linked to Digital Ocean
        "host": "coolmoviebites.com",
        // the new user you created on the server
        "username": "abhay",
        // the SSH key you generated earlier
        "pem": "~/.ssh/id_rsa"
    }
],

Then, a bit further down in the same file:

// Application name (No spaces)
"appName": "coolmoviebites", //you need to put in your app's name.// Location of app (local directory)
"app": ".", // "/path/to/the/app"// Configure environment
"env": {
    "ROOT_URL": "https://coolmoviebites.com",
    // any port other than 80 (the default)
    // because nginx is running on port 80
    "PORT": 3000
},

Now, within your ~/mup-your-project-name directory, setup your server by running