First Real Cloud Deployment

Sun, 10 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Today I deployed my first real full-stack application to AWS EC2.

The project is a hospital staff allocation system built with:

What I Learned

The most important thing was understanding how the different layers connect together.

Final architecture:

Browser
   ↓ HTTPS
DuckDNS
   ↓
Caddy reverse proxy
   ↓
Docker app container
   ↓
PostgreSQL container

The workflow looked like this:

Sun, 10 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

One of the most confusing parts of my first deployment was PostgreSQL authentication failing even after changing the password in .env.

The important lesson:

PostgreSQL only uses POSTGRES_PASSWORD the first time the database is created.

I originally started the database container with password A.

Docker created a persistent volume:

dsu_pg_data

Later I changed the password in .env to password B.

The application then failed with: