- [Tutor] Okay. So far in this course
we've built out our entire front end using view,
we've built up back end using Node.JS express and MongoDB,
and finally, we used the Axios library
to link up our front and back ends
to give us a functional full stack app.
Now, before we move on,
I want to point out that this alone
is a pretty impressive achievement.
As I mentioned earlier in the course,
so many web developers spend their entire professionalize
working entirely on one tiny part of a full stack app.
But in this course,
we've broken those barriers and seen how to develop
each individual part of a full stack application.
So anyway, congratulations on getting this far,
but there's still one big thing that we have left to do,
and that's release our full stack application.
In simple terms,
this means that we want to put our full stack application
somewhere where everyone can see it.
At the end of this section,
you'll be able to send your friends an actual URL
that they can use to visit your website
on their own computers,
rather than having your application running
as just a fun hobby project on your local machine.
Now there are a few steps
that we're going to need to follow
in order to be able to host our app like we want to.
The first thing we're going to do
is build our front end application
and serve the resulting files from our express server.
This will allow us to run our entire application
using only one server instead of running two,
like we've been doing for the entire course.
Next we're going to see how to create
and set up an account on a site called Heroku.
Heroku is a very popular hosting platform
that we're going to use to put our app online.
I personally love Heroku because it's just so easy to use
compared to setting up a platform like
Amazon web services for your needs.
Setting up a Heroku instance is dead simple.
At least that's been my experience.
Anyway, once we've set up Heroku,
we're going to move on to setting up a hosted MongoDB
instance on MongoDBs Atlas platform.
So far, we've just been using a local instance of MongoDB,
but now that we want our app to be globally accessible,
we've got to set up an instance of MongoDB
that our hosted full stack app can connect to.
And lastly, there are just a few minor changes
that we need to make to our server code
in order for it to work correctly in production.
We'll see exactly what these are when we come to them,
but they mostly have to do with making sure
our server connects to the correct database
when it's running a production.
And once we've done that, we'll be able to publish our app,
which we can do using GitHub.
So that's our basic plan of attack.
You might be thinking that sounds like a lot of different
technologies and you'd be right.
But that doesn't mean that what we're about to do
is super complicated.
It's actually pretty straightforward as you'll see.
So let's get started.