I will take you through the process of setting up your first server on an Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) Ubuntu Server.

• Tip: sign up with a new email if your account is older than a year

• Visit aws ssh key pairs
• I have found it's easier to upload a public key that you've created on your own machine. Visit Github Help if you need help creating your own public/private key pair.

• Sign in to AWS Management Console
• Select EC2
• Click on the blue "Launch Instance" button
• Choose an AMI: Choose Ubuntu 14.04 LTS
• Choose an Instance Type: t2.micro (make sure it says free tier eligible)
• Click "Next: Configure Intsance Details"
• We can just use the defaults here: Click "Next: Add Storage"
• We can just use the defaults again here: Click "Next: Tag Instance"
• Add a tag, for example a key of "Class" and a Value of "B20"
• Click "Next: Configure Security Group"
• Create a new security group should be selected. It will default to ssh access only. Add two more types of rules for access to ports 80 and 443 (HTTP and HTTPS)
• Click "Review and Launch"

• Click on View Instances or visit your EC2 Dashboard
• instance state will be 'initializing' then 'running' eventually
• find "Public IP" column and note address
• or find the "Public DNS" for the full hostname. This is useful as your IP address might change
• ssh ubuntu@hostname
• if you created a new key and it's not in your ssh keychain you may need to:

ssh ubuntu@hostname -I ~/.ssh/path-to-keyfile

replace path-to-keyfile with the actual path of your key file

• make an A record on your domain in Route 53 for convenience

The -y option is helpful because apt won't for wait for you to press 'y', it will just install the packages. Very helpful for when you're trying to script this entire process.

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install -y build-essential g++ tmux

curl -O http://nodejs.org/dist/v0.10.32/node-v0.10.32.tar.gz
tar -xvzf node-v0.10.32.tar.gz
cd node-v0.10.32
./configure --prefix=/opt/node
make
sudo mkdir -p /opt/node
sudo chown -R ubuntu.ubuntu /opt/node
make install

Add node to your path in ~/.bashrc:

echo "export PATH=/opt/node/bin:$PATH" >> ~/.bashrc

Then reload .bashrc

source ~/.bashrc

Double check to see that node is in your path:

which node => should be /opt/node/bin/node

Now, we need to add node to root's path too. To do this, we will need to use the visudo command to edit the secure path.

sudo visudo

edit your Defaults secure_path= line, around the thrird line, to look like:

Defaults secure_path="/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/opt/node/bin"

The key here is to put the path to node at the end of the secure path.

Go ahead and save the file.

Follow the directions here: http://docs.mongodb.org/manual/tutorial/install-mongodb-on-ubuntu/

To summarize:

sudo apt-key adv --keyserver hkp://keyserver.ubuntu.com:80 --recv 7F0CEB10
echo 'deb http://downloads-distro.mongodb.org/repo/ubuntu-upstart dist 10gen' | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/mongodb.list
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install mongodb-org

Luckily, Chris Lea keeps an up-to-date ubuntu ppa available.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:chris-lea/redis-server
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install redis-server -y

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:git-core/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install git -y

mongo
show dbs

• ctrl-d to exit

• redis-cli ping --> should see PONG

You can always find the External IP address of your server in the EC2 Dashboard, but I frequently use this shortcut from the command line:

curl icanhazip.com

I mean, install bower and any other global npm packages you use frequently.

npm -g install bower grunt-cli

I'll use one of our example apps.

Make sure you're in the ubuntu home directory: /home/ubuntu

cd
git clone https://github.com/codefellows/javascript-b15-notes.git notes
cd notes
npm install && bower install

To test out launching your app, and bind on any port under 1000, you need to use sudo to escalate to root privelege.

sudo -i
PORT=80 node server.js

visit the site http://YOUR-IP-HERE

(NOTE: At this point, after executing sudo -i, you are logged in as the root user. If you try to update your repository, e.g. with git pull origin master, your credentials will be rejected by github. Your key is specific to the ubuntu user. You need to be logged in regularly as ubuntu. Type ctrl + c to logout of root and it will log you back in as ubuntu.)

This will do in a pinch, but it's not a professional setup. What happens if your server reboots? You want something to re-start the server automatically.

npm -g install forever. Forever is a simple CLI tool for ensuring that a given script runs continuously.

Create /etc/init/notes.conf. This is an Ubuntu Upstart script.

You can always use nano if you are afraid of Vim…

/etc/init/notes.conf:

start on startup
stop on shutdown

expect fork

script
  PATH=/opt/node/bin:$PATH
  export PORT=80
  exec forever start /home/ubuntu/notes/server.js
end script

pre-stop script
  PATH=/opt/node/bin:$PATH
  exec forever stop /home/ubuntu/notes/server.js
end script

Then sudo start notes to start the app

You can use use sudo status notes to see the status of the service.

You can get a free SSL certificate, or for development, you can generate a self-signed certificate. Follow this Heroku Tutorial