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This is the part 8 of post Intro to Nodejs - part 7.
\nSo lets get started.
\nOur first challenge is to deploy our application to production.
\nThat means we need to deploy our backend to a live URL.
\ninstead of http://localhost:3000 , our URL would be something http://api.myapp.com
\nlets first break down what we need to do.
\nThis means we need to deploy two things to make it happen.
\nFirst, we’ll start with MongoDB.
\nOne of the options for free hosting is MongoDB Atlas / mlab. They provide free 512 MB storage which is more than enough for us.
\nlets head to https://www.mongodb.com/cloud/atlas
\nclick on Start Free and sign up
\nAfter Signup, Choose “Starter Cluster” on the left.
\nChoose any provide and click on create cluster.
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once its created, click on connect
\nwe need to do a couple of things
\nyou can add your current IP but then it would only work with your IP.
\nwhat you can do is add a white list IP 0.0.0.0/0
This is insecure but its fine.
\nyour network access should look like this.
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Click on connect your application
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Copy the connection string from there. Yours will be different.
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after pasting that connection string to the bottom (remember to add your password). Click on ‘From SRV’
\nonce you do, click on test. You should see something like this
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This means our Robo 3T connection was successful.
\nNext, click on Save and connect.
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You have been connected to your cluster. Right now, you don’t have any database. We can create it from here or from the web panel.
\nLets create it form the web panel.
\nclick on collections (remember for MongoDB / NoSQL, tables are called collections).
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click on Add Own
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add your database name and collection/table name
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Save and your database is created.
\nopen Robo 3T and hit refresh
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now you see the database here
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Now run your nodejs app.
\nhttp://localhost:3000/users/register
\nand a new record should be added to your database.
\nCongrats. The first step is done. Connection with a remote DB was successful.
\nLets now move to part 2.
\nDeploying our Node.js application.
\nThere are many options
\nFree Tiers : Heroku, Now.sh
\nPaid: Digital Occean, AWS, Google Cloud, Ali Cloud and many more.
\nWe will use Heroku.
\nHeroku will deploy our Nodejs application and give us back a URL. we can hit that URL to access our Node.js backend.
\nLets signup to Heroku https://www.heroku.com/
\nAfter Signup and Login, click on New
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There are a couple of options
\nWe will use the Github option. Click on Github.
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Lets connect with Part 7 repo I made for this tutorial.
\nClick on enable automatic deploys.
\nClick on deploy branch.
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I click on build and it gave me an error. It said I should either remove package-lock.json or yarn.lock
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You may or maynot get this error. If you get, delete the yarn.lock file and git push again.
\nI deleted file and git push again on part 7.
\nSince auto deployment is on, it will start build again. Lets see if we get any errors.
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It has been deployed. Lets see.
\nClick on open app
Our Node.js app was deployed but it had errors.
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You can install heroku CLI and see the logs. However I have an idea why it isn’t working.
\nRemember .env file ? our DB connection was in that file.
\nWe need to set the environment variables. We need to add our DB connection, our JWT secret key.
\nGo to Settings. Click on Config Vars.
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It updated but still didn’t work
\nI ran the command
\n heroku logs -a mybookyapp --tailto check for logs and see the issue. I got this.
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There was also another issue, we hard-coded the PORT in app.js. Heroku needs to handle it itself.
\nin app.js, update the code like this
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Okay, now after git push, it will deploy itself and we will wait and see it in action.
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yesssssssssssssssssssssssssssss !
\nOur app is live. Hooray !!
\nLets test it in postman. Just replace localhost:3000 with your URL
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Learning / Building things is fun. It requires patience, preservance and effort. But in the end, it’s really worth it.
\nThis is the last part of the series. I hope you learned some things from it. I personally learned so much from writing this series.
\nI would end this with this tweet / quote
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