PM2, 502 Bad gateway, Nginx serving both React app and NodeJS API

Question

I'm serving both React app and NodeJS API with Nginx configuration (from Nginx sites-available folder):

server {
    listen 80;
    listen [::]:80;

    root /var/www/html;

    index index.html index.htm index.nginx-debian.html;

    server_name my-site-name.com www.my-site-name.com;

    location /api/ {
        proxy_pass http://localhost:3000;

        proxy_set_header Host $host;
        proxy_cache_bypass $http_upgrade;

        proxy_http_version 1.1;
        proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade;
        proxy_set_header Connection 'upgrade';
    }

    location / {
        root /var/www/html/;
        try_files $uri /index.html;
    }
}

If I start the NodeJS API on the server with npm start - everything works. If I run the API as a process with PM2 - I get 502 Bad gateway by calling any API endpoint.

EDIT: PM2 doesn't serve app at expected port (3000). Found out by turning it off.

Answer 1

So the issue was not serving the app at expected port (3000).

The problem was in my server.js file which I ran by pm2 start server.js . I saw many suggestions online to start NodeJS app with pm2 start./bin/www command. You can do this if your Express NodeJS project is initialized by Express application generator .

My project wasn't initialized by Express generator, so I created a dummy project to see content of ./bin/www file.

> mkdir my-app
> cd my-app
> npx express-generator

Then I copied content of www file which is located in bin directory to my server.js file. Only change was in line 7:

var app = require('../app');

I changed it to

var app = require('./app');

Because both server.js and app.js files are located in my project root.

Answer 2

I went through the same issues while setting up my staging server. Posted a similar question

Few things that worked for me:

• Using try/catch loops wherever you missed them in your server side code
• Making sure all environment variables are properly being read
• Check pm2 logs for node errors
• Check nginx logs for configuration faults