I'm a new developer and I need help learning how to get code running in the cloud (beehaw.org)

submitted 1 year ago by reric88@beehaw.org to c/programming@beehaw.org

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I have looked at Google Cloud Run, Microsoft Azure and Kamatera so far. These are free trials, and I deleted and removed all projects after playing with them.

I am working on a chatting application for my portfolio. I'm using MERN to create the app and I can run it locally and connect to the local server with any device on the network. Before I got into this I didn't realize setting up a cloud server was going to be so confusing, and that's after trying to watch tutorials on youtube and going through documentation.

On google, people have talked about VM Instances, (Bare Metal Solution?) Servers, networks, VPC's, VPC Networks, serverless VPC, etc. and I have explored all of these things and I just don't understand why it's so hard to get a node.js file running somewhere remote.

Microsoft Azure and Kamatera were pretty much the same experience.

I'm not the smartest or faster person, I've got cognitive issues, but if anyone can kind of give me some simple steps or explanations to get me started in the right direction, I'd really appreciate it.

I don't need a complete write-up or guide, just a push in the right direction for my specific project, which is just getting my node.js code somewhere so the client can connect to through it. I think?

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[-] krewllobster@beehaw.org 1 points 1 year ago

When I was learning I used Heroku free tier to host sites/servers. I was also using the MERN stack and used a Heroku CLI tool to do deployments.

Here's a step by step guide on freecodecamp.org for how to deploy an app to heroku. Hope it's helpful!

[-] krewllobster@beehaw.org 1 points 1 year ago

https://www.freecodecamp.org/learn/back-end-development-and-apis/

This is probably more up to date than that blog post.

[-] s3rvant@beehaw.org 1 points 1 year ago

If you're comfortable working on a local VM then perhaps a VPS such as Linode or Digital Ocean would be a good place to start; they're essentially VMs hosted in cloud you have total control of so you can install whatever you want just like a local VM. Even the cheapest VPS option is plenty for this sort of testing.

These have free trials too such as: https://www.linode.com/tux

[-] reric88@beehaw.org 0 points 1 year ago

I'll look into this, thank you! I didn't look at a vps (I had to Google what vps meant) but I'll check it out!

I kept pushing with azure and I got pretty far with it, but I hit a snag when running az webapp up because I kept getting errors stating my app name already existed, or Id get a "forbidden" error if my app name was too unique

[-] s3rvant@beehaw.org 1 points 1 year ago

Yeah, bigger solutions like Azure, AWS, etc. have some cool features especially for scaling but... that comes with its own headaches.

For earlier stages I personally much prefer a simple VPS where I can freely do what I want with it including total wipes, snapshots / rollbacks, etc.

[-] reric88@beehaw.org 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Hey man, so Linode worked after a long time wrapping my head around how to get things up and running. It was a huge learning experience, but the "fewer options" all over the dashboard helped steer me in the right direction. As my first successful deployment of an app it isn't much and there are issues, but I'm really proud of what I've accomplished! Take a look at the cat app I'm working on! I probably don't need to tell you this but don't enter personal information in the chat, it is not secure. nostchat.ddns.net