How I Built and Deployed a Full-Stack MERN App on AWS EC2 using Docker Compose, Terraform, and GitHub Actions 🚀
dev.to·
Bridging full-stack application development with automated cloud deployment is an essential milestone for backend engineers expanding into systems architecture. A practical end-to-end implementation combines a Node.js and Express REST API—featuring JWT access and refresh token authentication—with a MongoDB database and containerizes the services using Docker Compose. Provisioning cloud infrastructure on EC2 via Terraform infrastructure-as-code ensures repeatable deployments, while configuring Nginx as a reverse proxy alongside Let's Encrypt provides automated HTTPS encryption. Connecting these components to a GitHub Actions push-to-deploy CI/CD pipeline automates testing and deployment workflows on every code commit. Studying this full-stack deployment pipeline offers actionable insights into container management, automated continuous delivery, and infrastructure automation applicable across modern web applications.