I'm trying to deploy a MERN app to a DigitalOcean droplet using Nginx (I've used a connection string to connect to a MongoDB atlas instance). The frontend static files seem to successfully work, but I face two issues when it comes to the backend (a Nodejs/express app). First, I get a connect() failed (111: connection refused) for every request from the frontend to the backend.
2021/07/12 23:54:32 [error] 5101#5101: *394 connect() failed (111: Connection refused) while
connecting to upstream, client: "My Ip", server: "example.com", request: "GET
/api/images HTTP/1.1", upstream: "http://127.0.0.1:5000/images", host: "example.com",
referrer: "https://example.com/"
Second, I face a 404 Not Found nginx/1.14.0 (Ubuntu) error while trying to check the routes through the Postman. Not sure both of these are the same problem.
Here's my Nginx configuration in /etc/nginx/sites-available/default:
server {
root var/www/html;
index index.html index.htm index.nginx-debian.html;
server_name example.com www.example.com;
location /api/ {
proxy_pass http://localhost:5000/;
}
location / {
root /home/${my_non_root_user}/frontend/deploy;
try_files $uri /index.html;
}
listen [::]:443 SSL ipv6only=on; #managed by Certbot
listen 443 SSL; #managed by Certbot
ssl_certificate /etc/letsencrypt/live/${example.com}/fullchain.pem; #managed by Certbot
ssl_certificate_key /etc/letsencrypt/live/${example.com}/privkey.pem; #managed by Certbot
include /etc/letsencrypt/options-ssl-nginx.conf; #managed by Certbot
ssl_dhparam /etc/letsencrypt/ssl-dhparams.pem; #managed by Certbot
}
server {
if ($host = www.example.com) {
return 301 https://$host$request_uri;
} #managed by Certbot
if ($host = example.com) {
return 301 https://$host$request_uri;
} #managed by Certbot
listen 80 default_server;
listen [::]:80 default_server;
server_name example.com www.example.com;
return 404; #managed by Certbot
}
This is how my backend server.js looks like:
import express from 'express'
import path from 'path'
import dotenv from 'dotenv'
import connectDB from './config/db.js'
import memberRoutes from './routes/memberRoutes.js'
import messageRoutes from './routes/messageRoutes.js'
import fileRoutes from './routes/fileRoutes.js'
dotenv.config()
connectDB()
const app = express()
app.use(express.json())
// routes
app.use('/api/members', memberRoutes)
app.use('/api/messages', messageRoutes)
app.use('/api/files', fileRoutes)
const __dirname = path.resolve()
app.use('/files', express.static(path.join(__dirname, '/files')))
const PORT = process.env.PORT || 5000
app.listen(
PORT,
console.log(`Server running in ${process.env.NODE_ENV} mode on port
${PORT}`)
)
When I make a request in Postman, to {{URL}}/messages (No difference it is a GET, or POST), where {{URL}} is THE_IP_TO_DROPLET, I get this output:
<HTML>
<head>
<title>404 Not Found</title>
</head>
<body bgcolor="white">
<center>
<h1>404 Not Found</h1>
</center>
<hr>
<center>nginx/1.14.0 (Ubuntu)</center>
</body>
</html>
Do you have any suggestion? Totally stuck in this for the whole weekend!
Thank you.