Published on 2025-08-13 9:20 by Kevin Coyle

Devops let’s goooo

In June, we merged a small but important UX fix to stabilize the navigation dropdowns. Since then, we focused on hardening our infrastructure, clarifying deployment, and polishing a few aspects of the app. This post summarizes the most meaningful changes from my last post.

Much like this badge… I think this Terrform stuff is all stuck together well.

Highlights

• Infrastructure as Code (Terraform)
  • Finalized a full Terraform setup under terraform/ to provision the app’s AWS foundation: VPC, subnets, security groups, IAM, RDS, S3, ECR, ACM, and an EC2 module with user_data bootstrap.
  • Added environment-specific variables for dev and prod, plus consolidated variables and outputs. Deployment docs included.
• Deployment and Ops
  • Updated Docker assets and docker-compose.prod.yml; added backend/Dockerfile.prod and an nginx/nginx.conf for production reverse proxying.
  • Added scripts/setup-aws-infrastructure.sh and deployment examples (deploy-example.yml, main-example.yml).
• Frontend and middleware
  • Minor refinements to src/components/Navigation.tsx and the community Q&A page at src/app/community/[questionId]/page.tsx.
  • Introduced src/middleware.ts to support runtime behaviors at the edge (e.g., redirects/headers), paving the way for future platform features.
• Developer experience
  • Added a Makefile for common tasks and several example env/config files (.env.local.backup, env.prod.example).
  • Dependency housekeeping in package.json and package-lock.json.

By the numbers

• I’ve changed 54 files, 6181 insertions, 557 deletions

What this enables

• Repeatable infrastructure: Teams can stand up and evolve environments with code review and versioning.
• Clearer deployments: Docker, Nginx, and example pipeline files make the release path easier to follow and automate.
• Operational guardrails: Middleware and config defaults reduce drift and support future auth/routing behaviors.

Getting started (at a glance)

• Review the infrastructure docs in terraform/TERRAFORM_DEPLOYMENT.md and AWS_DEPLOYMENT.md.
• Use the Makefile targets and example YAML files to scaffold CI/CD, and nginx/nginx.conf for production reverse proxy.
• Sync local/env variables from the provided examples (env.prod.example, .env.local.backup).

Written by Kevin Coyle