Tutorial: Creating a WebSocket Chat Application, Dockerizing, and Deploying on EC2 with NGINX and SSL

Photo by Jaycee Xie on Unsplash

Step 4: Pulling the Docker Image, Setting Up NGINX, and Enabling SSL

1. SSH into your EC2 instance:

ssh -i your-ec2-key.pem ec2-user@ec2-xx-xx-xx-xx.compute-1.amazonaws.com

1. Replace your-ec2-key.pem with your EC2 key pair file and ec2-xx-xx-xx-xx.compute-1.amazonaws.com with your EC2 instance's public DNS.
2. Pull the Docker image from Docker Hub:
3. On the EC2 instance, pull the Docker image you pushed to Docker Hub:

docker pull your-docker-username/my-websocket-app:latest

1. Replace your-docker-username with your actual Docker Hub username.
2. Run the Docker container on EC2:
3. Once the image is pulled, run the container on the EC2 instance:

docker run -d -p 8080:8080 --name my-websocket-app your-docker-username/my-websocket-app:latest

1. This command starts the container in detached mode, mapping port 8080 of the EC2 instance to port 8080 of the container.

Setting Up NGINX and Enabling SSL:

1. Install NGINX:
2. Install NGINX on your EC2 instance:

Configure NGINX:sudo yum update -y
sudo amazon-linux-extras install nginx1 -y
sudo systemctl start nginx

1. Edit the NGINX configuration file to set up a reverse proxy for the WebSocket server:

sudo nano /etc/nginx/nginx.conf

1. Add the following configuration at the end of the http block:

server {
    listen 80;
    server_name your-domain.com;

    location / {
        proxy_pass http://localhost:8080;
        proxy_http_version 1.1;
        proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade;
        proxy_set_header Connection "upgrade";
    }
}

1. Replace your-domain.com with your actual domain name.
2. Enable SSL with Let’s Encrypt (Certbot):
3. Install Certbot to obtain an SSL certificate for your domain:

sudo yum install certbot python3-certbot-nginx -y

1. Obtain the SSL certificate:

sudo certbot --nginx -d your-domain.com

1. Follow the prompts to configure Certbot. Once done, Certbot will automatically set up SSL for NGINX and renew the certificates.
2. Restart NGINX:
3. Restart NGINX to apply the changes:

sudo systemctl restart nginx

1. Ensure that NGINX is running and SSL is enabled by visiting https://your-domain.com.

This concludes Step 4. Now your WebSocket application should be running behind NGINX with SSL enabled on your EC2 instance.