Just some quick notes on deploying your CRA using Nginx on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS

Photo by david moore on Unsplash

In the article “Using Certbot and Express.js to secure your CRA that uses React Hooks on Ubuntu 18” we used Node.js to deploy our CRA. In this article, we look at how we would deploy it using Nginx instead.

Installing Nginx

First of all we need to install nginx

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install nginx

Check that the SSL port you plan to use is open:

sudo ufw status
Status: active
To                         Action      From
--                         ------      ----
443/tcp                    ALLOW       Anywhere

Nginx configuration

Time to configure Nginx, go to the folder /etc/nginx, it looks like this:

sudi@hm-1:/etc/nginx$ tree -d
.
├── conf.d
├── modules-available
├── modules-enabled
├── sites-available
├── sites-enabled
└── snippets

remove the default files in sites-available and sites-enabled. Instead, we create a new file called himinds.

We need to create a symbolic link to the sites-enabled folder

The syntax will look like this:

ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/MYDOMAIN /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/MYDOMAIN

Nginx commands

Some useful Nginx commands.

sudo service nginx start
sudo service nginx stop
sudo service status nginx

Deploy a new version of the CRA

So when we have updated our CRA based React app and want to deploy a new version we would run the following command in the himinds-boosting-innovation-web-secure-cra/hn-app/ folder:

npm run build 

And then we need to restart Nginx

sudo service restart nginx

Thank you for reading! Take care and hope to see you soon. 🙏🏽

This article is a living document please reach out to me if you want to contribute or see anything inaccurate here. This article is part of our “Boosting Innovation” project.