In this chapter, we started a journey to learn about deploying Node.js services to live servers. The goal was to learn deployment to cloud hosting, but to get there we learned the basics of getting reliable background processes on Linux systems.
We started by reviewing the Notes application architecture and seeing how that will affect deployment. That enabled us to understand the requirements for server deployment.
Then we learned the traditional way to deploy services on Linux using an init script. To do that, we learned how to use PM2 to manage processes, and used it to integrate as a persistent background process. PM2 is a useful tool for managing background processes on Unix/Linux systems. Deploying and managing persistence is a key skill for anyone developing web applications.
While that was performed on your laptop, the exact same steps could be used on a public server such as a VPS rented from a web hosting company. With a little bit of work, we could use these scripts...