I am building a MERN stack application in docker containers, deployed with docker-compose, as a personal project, which i will deploy. i am curious how i go about securing this.

i know that i need to setup https between the client and my backend(api), and have seen several examples where they set up an nginx server in the frontend(react app) container. how does this nginx server differentiate requests to the api (logging in/fetching sensitive data) and requests for the webpage iteself.

the terms load-balancer and reverse proxy come up alot.

is it possible to set up a digital ocean load balancer with https proxying which points to my droplet on my vpc?

i’m very new to this, but very interested in learning all i can, thanks for any help!