Deploying to a VPS (From Zero to Live)

Your app runs on your laptop. It works. And now you need it to run somewhere else - somewhere that's on all night, that strangers can reach at a real URL, that doesn't vanish when you close the lid. That gap, between "works on my machine" and "live on the internet," is where a lot of otherwise-confident developers freeze. Not because it's hard, but because nobody ever walked them through the whole arc: the box, getting in, keeping the app alive, the domain, and the lock icon in the browser.

This guide is that walkthrough. By the end you'll have rented a Linux box, hardened it just enough to sleep at night, run your app as a proper background service that restarts itself, pointed a domain at it, put a reverse proxy in front, and earned a real HTTPS certificate. From zero to a real URL.

How to read this

Want it to finally make sense? Read in order. Each phase hands the next one a working server, and the mental models stack: a box you can reach → an app that stays up → a public, safe front door.
Already have a box and SSH access? Skip to Phase 2: Run Your App as a Service.
App's running but the world can't reach it? Go straight to Phase 3: Make It Public & Safe.

This is an intermediate guide. It assumes you're comfortable in a terminal and have an app that runs locally. It does not assume you've ever touched a server.

The phases

Get a Box and Get In - what a VPS actually is, renting one, your first SSH login, and the three pieces of first-login hardening (a non-root user, updates, a firewall) that everyone skips and later regrets.
Run Your App as a Service - getting your code onto the box, running it, and then handing it to systemd so it restarts on crash, comes back after a reboot, and doesn't die when you close your terminal. Plus how to confirm it's actually listening on its port.
Make It Public & Safe - pointing a domain at the box with a DNS A record, putting nginx in front as a reverse proxy, and getting a free HTTPS certificate from Let's Encrypt - without exposing your app port directly to the world.

This guide gets you to a single live box running your app behind HTTPS. Multi-server setups, zero- downtime deploys, containers, and CI/CD pipelines are bigger topics that build on this foundation - they each deserve their own guide rather than a rushed paragraph here.

Related guides: SSH and Keys · Linux for Servers · Load Balancers and nginx