Why should you care?

Node should not serve TLS and static assets; Nginx handles efficiently.

See it live — copy this example

Paste into your MeanVerse project (Angular + Express + MongoDB), then run with ng serve / node / mongosh as noted.

# /etc/nginx/conf.d/meanverse.conf
server {
  listen 443 ssl http2;
  server_name app.meanverse.com;

  ssl_certificate /etc/ssl/meanverse.crt;
  ssl_certificate_key /etc/ssl/meanverse.key;

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

  location /api/ {
    proxy_pass http://meanverse_api_upstream;
    proxy_set_header Host $host;
    proxy_set_header X-Request-Id $request_id;
  }
}

What happened?

• try_files serves Angular SPA — all routes fall back to index.html.
• /api/ proxies to upstream pool of Express containers.
• X-Request-Id enables log correlation.

Practice next

1. Build Angular to dist; copy to /var/www.
2. Define upstream with api pod IPs or K8s service.
3. Enable gzip and HTTP/2.
4. Add rate limit zone on /api/auth/login.
5. Cache static assets with immutable Cache-Control.

Remember

Nginx = TLS + static + reverse proxy. SPA fallback via try_files. Request id header for tracing.

Single public entry

Only Nginx ports 443 exposed; API pods private network.

Outcome: Attack surface reduced; TLS centralized.