The DevOps Journey: From Lagging App to Automated Pipeline

From a Lagging App to a Fully Automated CI/CD Pipeline: My journey building a professional backend infrastructure from the ground up. 🚀
I recently completed a personal project that was a deep dive into modern DevOps and systems architecture. The goal was clear: move away from the limitations of a free-tier platform and build a robust, scalable, and automated production environment for a Node.js API.
The result is a complete infrastructure deployed on a VPS, leveraging industry-best practices.
✨ What I Built:
Containerization with Docker: The API and its MongoDB database are fully containerized, ensuring a consistent, portable, and isolated environment from development to production.
Orchestration with Docker Compose: Simplified management of the multi-container setup, its network, and volumes, effectively treating infrastructure as code.
Reverse Proxy & Security with Nginx + SSL: Nginx acts as the secure entry point for the API, handling traffic and, most importantly, implementing top-tier security with a Let's Encrypt SSL/TLS certificate (HTTPS).
CI/CD Automation with GitHub Actions: The centerpiece of the project! I created a full CI/CD pipeline that, on every push to the main branch, automatically:
Runs automated tests as a quality gate.
If tests pass, securely connects to the VPS via SSH.
Pulls the latest code, rebuilds the Docker image, and restarts the containers with zero manual intervention.
🧠 Key Learnings: This was an intense debugging journey and a massive learning experience: from configuring networks and firewalls on a Linux VPS, to navigating the complexities of DNS and SSL certificates, and finally creating a resilient automation workflow.
This project proved to me that a deep understanding of infrastructure elevates a developer's capabilities, enabling us to build faster, more secure, and truly reliable solutions.
Curious about the code and the configuration files? Check out the full project on GitHub: 👉 https://lnkd.in/dDsWe7W9
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