Serve app on port 80 using Nginx

This example was tested on ubuntu machine but should work the same on any linux distribution.

First of all you need to install nginx:

sudo apt-get install nginx

Then we need to remove the default nginx configuration file:

sudo rm /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default

Create new nginx configuration file (I will name it myApp):

sudo nano /etc/nginx/sites-available/myApp

This is myApp file content:

server {
    listen 80;
    server_name example.com;

    location / {
        proxy_set_header   X-Forwarded-For $remote_addr;
        proxy_set_header   Host $http_host;
        proxy_pass         "http://127.0.0.1:3000";
    }
}

Make sure to change server_name example.com and the proxy_pass 3000 port to your settings.

Basically this configuration will make nginx act as a reverse proxy and will forward all the requests from port 80 to port 3000.

Then we will create a symlink between sites-available and sites-enabled.

sudo ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/myApp /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/myApp

And finally we will restart our service and everything should work:

sudo service nginx restart