So as the title says I am deploying a react app with the express backend on an ec2 instance.

What I am attempting to do to do:

(just listing this here to provide crucial context just in case I'm messing up elsewhere)

• have my express production mode run on port 80 with the react build html as root.

• run the build on an ec2 instance

• use nginx to reverse proxy to my domain on https and port 443

• run server.js on production mode via PM2

Things I am currently having trouble with:

My Nginx configuration was originally configured to try to proxy the react app running with the express app through a reverse proxy between the two. That's changed so I am trying to now have the server configured to reverse proxy everything into my app.

I was following this article as my reference but the major difference is they want me to use the nginx conf file and not the sites_enabled file which I had made my initial nginx setup. From what i can see in the article it looks like the configuration files changed layout as well so that may be outdated practice.

Here is what I currently have for Nginx sites_enabled:

    listen 443 default_server;
    listen [::]:443 default_server;
    server_name example.com www.example.com;
    root /home/ubuntu/client/build;
    location / {
    try_files $uri /index.html;
    }
    location /complete {
    proxy_pass https://www.example.com;
    }
     # managed by Certbot
    ssl on;
    ssl_certificate /etc/letsencrypt/live/example.com/fullchain.pem; # managed by Certbot
    ssl_certificate_key /etc/letsencrypt/live/example.com/privkey.pem;

 # managed by Certbot

}
server {
    if ($host = www.example.com) {
        return 301 https://$host$request_uri;
    } # managed by Certbot


    if ($host = example.com) {
        return 301 https://$host$request_uri;
    } # managed by Certbot


       listen 0.0.0.0:80;
       server_name example.com www.example.com;
       rewrite ^ https://$host$request_uri? permanent;

}

At the time of writing this I am not able to run things like this so I can only use express setting it to port 443 and placing the certification files there.