How to deploy a VueJS App using Nginx on Ubuntu

There are thousands of blogs and websites out there explaining how to do a hello world and how to start with VueJS, but in this
little post, I’m just going to be explaining how to do deploy a VueJs app after you have run the command through the
CLI npm run build.

So when you run the command npm run build a dist folder is created and that folder’s got the
essential .js files to run our app, when we want to run our app on an Nginx server by default the vue-router is not going to work well
so that Nginx does not come ready to work by default with a VueJs app

This is basically for a Linux Ubuntu distribution if you’ve got any other Linux distribution just pay attention where is going to be
set the www/html folder and the Nginx settings so that this is useful for any Linux distribution 

Install and configure nginx

sudo apt install nginx

Double check to make sure the nginx service is running with command service nginx status, then open your browser and
enter url http://{server_ip}, you should see some welcome message from nginx. “replace server_ip by your ser ver ip address”

Configure nginx

sudo touch /etc/nginx/sites-available/vue_project sudo ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/vue_project /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/vue_project sudo vim /etc/nginx/sites-available/vue_project

Sample configuration:

server {   listen      80;   server_name example.com;   charset utf-8;   root    {{app_root}}/dist;   index   index.html index.htm;   # Always serve index.html for any request   location / {       root {{app_root}}/dist;       try_files $uri /index.html;   }   error_log  /var/log/nginx/vue-app-error.log;   access_log /var/log/nginx/vue-app-access.log; }

What I mean with this {{app_root}}/dist, is that you must replace what is inside {{}} and set the path where you’ve got your application, copy an paste the piece of code but replace what is inside of the {{}} with your path, in my case I just created a folder in /var/www/html/vuejs, and inside that folder I unzipped the vue folder app which I downloaded from GitHub and run npm run build, I did it with GitHub but you can  upload to the server the files too with SCP or with any

other tools, it is up to you, if you do not have Nodejs and Npm on your Linux server just click on

this https://tecadmin.net/install-latest-nodejs-npm-on-ubuntu/ where you are going to be guided

step by step to set up a proper Nodejs and Npm for you.

Check configuration, then restart nginx:

sudo nginx -t sudo service nginx restart

Now, you should have your application up and running