How I set up my arch machine to use it as a node server

First up, I installed ufw, a firewall that is supposed to be easy to use- the name literally means “Uncomplicated FireWall”. Here are the commands I ran to get ufw set up:

sudo pacman -Sy ufw
sudo ufw allow SSH    # so my current ssh connection doesn't get cut off :)
sudo ufw allow 80/tcp # allow net trafic to hit the machine

sudo ufw enable
sudo systemctl enable ufw # set to run at boot

— and that’s the end of ufw configuration

Next up I installed nginx:

sudo pacman -Sy nginx
sudo systemctl enable nginx.service

— I already had node installed so I didn’t have to do anything about that, but you might have to make sure that node is installed and up to date.

Next up, I configured nginx. The node app is listening on port 8080, so we have to tell nginx to forward port 80 traffic to 8080.

Do: sudo vim /etc/nginx/ngnix.conf

And now we’re going to modify one of the server blocks to point to our own location. Here’s what my server blocks look like for this server, which has a domain of abrahamq.mit.edu:

server {
    listen       80;
    server_name  abrahamq.mit.edu;

    #charset koi8-r;

    #access_log  logs/host.access.log  main;

    location / {
        proxy_pass http://localhost:8080;
    }
}

Next up, I installed pm2, a process manager for node. It will make sure that node gets restarted if it if the app crashes.

npm install -g pm2

Now I pulled in the node project with git and did:

pm2 start <app.js>

(in reality I have a process.json that describes some more stuff that I want pm2 to do).

Now you should be able to see the app at your domain.