This means you will not have problems in the long run. It is best to go with the LTS version for actual projects, because the provider guarantees that it will be supported and maintained for a long time.

On this page, I will select Ubuntu 20.04 since it is the latest LTS version at the time I am writing this post. Let's create our droplet by clicking the Get Started button.Īfter clicking the button, it will ask us to choose a VM image. It will also ask you if you want to move any resources, but for now just click Skip – we will create the droplet later. It will ask you to name your project.Įnter whatever name you want. Let's click on the new project button on the left side menu. We should first create a project that will contain our droplets. I am assuming that you have already signed up and logged in to Digital Ocean before proceeding. Since it is a VM, its CPU and memory share can be easily increased, usually by throwing more money at your provider. So a Droplet is your Virtual Machine on a shared server. You can think of the server as an apartment in which you own or rent a flat.ĭroplets work with the help of Virtual Machines which run on the server. It has a concept called Droplets, which is basically your share of a server. It is ideal for deploying a course or hobby project. Also, a $100 credit is included in the GitHub student pack so you do not have to pay anything for a couple of months. I choose Digital Ocean because it is cheap and the interface is really easy to use, compared to the likes of AWS. If you want to follow this tutorial in Windows, you can use Powershell or some other Unix emulator of your choice.Īlthough I will use Node.js as the platform of our example application, most of the steps are the same for any web application. If you are not familiar with basic commands, I would advise you to read up on them a bit. You should have some basic knowledge on how the Terminal works and how to work in Vi/Vim before getting started. So let's get started without wasting any time.

Then we'll configure this server, connect to it, install Nginx and configure it, pull or create our Node app, and run it as a process.Īs you can see, there is a lot to do and it will be an action-packed tutorial. We will start by renting a server on Digital Ocean. In this tutorial, we are going to learn everything we need to know before deploying a Node app to a production server.