Nginx ~ Deploying a Go Web Application

Nginx is another one of those technologies that I’ve known of for a while, but haven’t had the chance to dig into. This blog will cover how to deploy a basic Golang web application on a $5/month ubuntu 18.04 vm hosted by Digital Ocean. I’ve found a really good blog by Michael Okoh which is what I am going to learn from.

The first thing needed is a Go web application. I’ve already done this step with a simple web app that returns the IPv4 address of the user and a quote from one of my favorite movies.

Next is to create a systemd unit file. Mine looks like the following.

[Unit]
Description=iseeyou

[Service]
Type=simple
Restart=always
RestartSec=5s
ExecStart=/root/iseeyou/iseeyou
StandardOutput=syslog
StandardError=syslog

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

There was an issue with tpl = template.Must(template.ParseGlob("templates/*")), and I didn’t dig into it much, but fixed my changing the path to "/root/iseeyou/templates/*". My assumption is the service looks for a templates dir within /lib/systemd/system where the iseeyou.service file is.

With the service and application running, now for Nginx. A simple sudo apt install nginx and it’s installed. Next to create a file in /etc/nginx/sites-available called fourohfournotfound.com. In this file we want to specify the following.

server {
	server_name fourohfournotfound.com www.fourohfournotfound.com;

	location / {
		proxy_pass http://localhost:<YOUR SERVERS PORT>;
		proxy_set_header Host $host;
                proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
                proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
	}
}

Finally run

sudo ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/fourohfournotfound.com /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/fourohfournotfound.com

&&

sudo nginx -s reload

Make sure you replace fourohfournotfound.com with your own domain.

Goto fourohfournotfound.com and enjoy!