Server hosting

[rosstc]

Hey, wondering if I could get some advice from anyone who is hosting their own version of townsquare as to how exactly they are hosting and running the server component of the site. If from my local machine I run the dev server using npm run serve then everything is fine. Splitting out the project and running separate site and server components though doesn't seem to work for me.

I'm able to setup the static hosting of the site built using npm run build in AWS using S3 and CloudFront etc, but am having some trouble running the server part. I created a basic EC2 and ran the server part but no combination of settings seems to work. The static site just keeps failing to connect via sockets, even in development mode with no cert or host validation etc.

Anyone got a working instance setup on AWS or Github (not fussed what the platform is) that they could share some information about?

[bra1n]

Hey there,
did you read the README here? https://github.com/bra1n/townsquare/tree/develop/server#readme
What kind of error messages are you seeing when trying to connect to the socket? It sounds like the configuration might be wrong or the code not adjusted for your self-hosted backend.

[RobhJoh]

@rosstc Have you gotten it to work? If so, would you like to share how? As I have made a retheming of BotC I need to host this myself.

[rosstc]

Hey @RobhJoh, I did manage to get it working yes. Go check out my groups fork for the front end hosting stuff. The backend part I haven't done as infra as code yet, but how I got it working in AWS was using an Amazon Linux 2 EC2 instance (t2.micro) running in a public subnet with a public IP.

I created a Route53 zone linked to a custom DNS I purchased and created an A record that points to the public IP of the EC2. The EC2 allows 8080, 80, 443 and 8081 from anywhere inbound and anything out. From there I just copied the source code to the machine and have a service that run the /server stuff (node index.js) in the background, which serves the app on port 8080.

To get it to work properly though I had to go through the certificate stuff as referenced in the README. To do this I get free SSL certs through Let's Encrypt installed via certbot. To get the cert I use certbot certonly --standalone which spins up a temporary webserver to validate the domain etc. I copy those certs and rename them as appropriate in the /server directory and it works

[RobhJoh]

Super big thank you @rosstc for that extensive answer!

[rosstc]

Given the answer above and the fact I got it working, I might close this. If anyone needs further info in future you can contact me. Thanks