Setting up a minimal Nodejs app + Postgres in a Droplet

Hi,

My task is to setup a Nodejs app with Express/knex and Postgres. Unfortunately the “App” way did not work for me due to some self signed SSL certificate issue and technical support after a very long ping-pong game suggested to try the Droplet with Managed Database way.

I followed instructions here:

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-install-nginx-on-ubuntu-20-04

to install NginX, then also here

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-set-up-a-node-js-application-for-production-on-ubuntu-20-04

to install nodejs and run the app. Now I have a Droplet with nodejs and nginx and it is possible to connect to the managed db via psql tool if I have ssh’ed to Droplet.

Now what I see is that I have nginx running and serving /var/www/html default page it puts there, but I can’t make it serve the nodejs server running on port 3000.

I ended up with the following config:

nano /etc/nginx/conf.d/website.conf

server {
    listen 80;
    server_name api.thewebsite.com;

    location / {
        proxy_set_header   X-Forwarded-For $remote_addr;
        proxy_set_header   Host $http_host;
        proxy_pass         http://<IP address of this droplet>:3000;
    }
}

Opening the IP in web browser shows nginx error code 502 Bad Gateway.

I am sure the nginx was restarted, it worked before the conf added and served the default html page. Also the nodejs server is running fine if I launch it manually.

What am I missing?