We have finished the site, but are having trouble getting the site live. The website is essentially a Humans for New York but remixed for the FCC Community. Any help (or if you know anyone who can help) would be much appreciated.
Here is the github repo for more context: https://github.com/mmhansen/campers-of-fcc
Thanks in advance!!
It would help to know what you’ve already tried and what your deployment target is. Heroku? Digital Ocean?
We have tried Heroku but were advised to go with Digital Ocean (we also have a student credit for digital ocean as well, so are hoping to go with that).
The codebase (all 3000+ lines of it) is ready to be deployed, but we’ve come across a problem with how to figure out digital ocean. We had someone working on it with experience in that domain, but he is currently swamped at his job. So we’ve dove into digital ocean tutorials and quite frankly feel a bit overwhelmed trying to figure it out. I apologize for not being able to be more specific.
Here’s as far as we got in Heroku before we switched: https://campers-fcc.herokuapp.com/
It is overwhelming, for sure. It also requires regular maintenance and a financial investment. While it is technically the best option, I would strongly advise going with Heroku for its simplicity. What is it about the app as you’ve already got it on Heroku that’s not working for you?
Platforms like Heroku are doing quite a few things to make developers lives easier and their hobby tier is only $7 / month ($2 more than a 512MB droplet).
With a VPS (like DigitalOcean) you’re only getting a linux virtual machine + network connection. You’d have to set up the firewall, a reverse proxy to handle incoming requests, MongoDB and Node. It’s easy to either run into permissions issues or open up security holes.
I’d recommend asking your advisor why DO is preferable and what they’d recommend doing about the additional considerations.
You’ll run into issues on Heroku if you want to handle file uploads (such as profile pictures), but aside from that Heroku really is a great, and scalable, deployment option.
If you do need better asset hosting, maybe use AWS (or similar).
Happy to help. Email me at michael at mherman dot org.