A tiny Ubuntu box

Laptop was fine. Now we want a public address. One Ubuntu machine, same region as SES (ap-south-1). We click the console together. Don't jump ahead.

Open EC2

1. console.aws.amazon.com → search EC2
2. Region top-right: Mumbai ap-south-1

Launch

1. Instances → Launch instances
2. Name: club-portal-api
3. AMI: Ubuntu Server 24.04 LTS · 64-bit (x86)
4. Type: t3.micro (or t2.micro)
5. Key pair: create club-portal → RSA → .pem → download once

Who can knock

Network → Edit: public IP Enable. Security group club-portal-sg:

Leave 4000 closed. Nginx talks to Express on localhost. Don't expose 4000 "just to test."

Launch. Wait for Running + 2/2 checks. Copy Public IPv4. After Nginx that's http://THAT_IP/health — no domain. Elastic IP only if you care about stop/start or you actually have DNS.

chmod 400 ~/Downloads/club-portal.pem
ssh -i ~/Downloads/club-portal.pem ubuntu@PASTE_PUBLIC_IP

Type yes. Then sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y.

Database stays on Neon. This box is just Node, Nginx, PM2. Neon still needs DATABASE_URL on this machine (next slide). Without it, public /health works and live register does not.