Can I host a Strapi CMS and the front-end application on the same droplet?

Posted on February 26, 2020

Is it possible to host a Strapi CMS and the front-end application (also running on NodeJS) that consumes the Strapi API on the same droplet? Is it possible to use sub-domains to direct tot he 2 apps? e.g. admin.domain.com for Strapi and domain.com just loads the public app?

I’m really a novice when it comes to hosting/deployment so appreciate any advice.

Thanks!

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edsonmar321

September 27, 2020

hello can you help me? I bought a droplet with strapi and I have error when I assign strapi to a subdomain when assigning my strapi to a subdomain admin.mydomain.com first the login image disappears, I get a 404 not found error and when entering admin.mydomain.com/admin I get an error 405 in / admin / init. Help please I am hazing on strapi and hosting it in production in the vps

Bobby

February 26, 2020

Hello,

Yes, this would not be a problem. What you would need keep in mind is:

Make sure that the Strapi and the Node.js applications are running on different ports, for example, start Strapi on port 1337 as suggested in the documentation.
You can take a look at the steps on how to install Strapi on a DigitalOcean Droplet here:

https://strapi.io/documentation/3.0.0-alpha.x/guides/deployment.html#digital-ocean

Then you can start Node.js on port 8080 for example.
Finally install Nginx and set it up as a reverse proxy for your Node.js application:

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-set-up-a-node-js-application-for-production-on-ubuntu-16-04

Also if needed you can create a second Nginx server block for your Strapi app and set the server_name to your admin.domain.com subdomain name as you mentioned. The Nginx proxy rules that you would need to add for the Strapi application would be a bit different to the Node.js ones, you can use the following:

proxy_pass http://localhost:1337;  
proxy_http_version 1.1;  
proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade;  
proxy_set_header Connection 'upgrade';  
proxy_set_header Host $host;  
proxy_cache_bypass $http_upgrade;

Hope that this helps! Let me know if you have any questions. Regards, Bobby