Week 11 Assignment - MERN App Deployment

Goal

The goal of this assignment is to deploy a MERN stack blog application using:

• Terraform to provision infrastructure
• Ansible to configure the backend server
• AWS S3 to host the frontend
• MongoDB Atlas for the database

Steps

1. Used Terraform to:

   • Create EC2 instance for backend
   • Create S3 bucket for frontend
   • Create IAM credentials

2. Used Ansible to:

   • Install Node.js and npm on EC2
   • Install pm2
   • Clone backend repo and install dependencies
   • Start backend with pm2

3. MongoDB Atlas:

   • Created free cluster
   • Whitelisted EC2 IP
   • Created database and user
   • Connected to backend via .env

4. Frontend:

   • Built frontend with npm run build
   • Synced dist/ folder to S3
   • Enabled static website hosting

5. Media Uploads:

   • Used S3 bucket for storing images
   • Integrated image upload in blog posts

Tools Used

• Terraform
• Ansible
• AWS EC2, S3, IAM
• MongoDB Atlas
• Node.js, React

Cleanup

• Ran terraform destroy to remove resources
• Removed IAM credentials

Screenshots

• PM2 showing backend running.png
• MongoDB cluster.png
• Media upload success.png
• S3 frontend in browser.png
• diagram architecture.png