This chapter has been quite a journey in learning two ways to deploy Node.js applications to a production server.

You started by reviewing the Notes application architecture and how that will affect deployment. That let you understand what you had to do for server deployment.

Then you learned the traditional way to deploy services on Linux using an init script. The PM2 command is a useful tool for managing background processes. You also learned how to provision a remote server using a virtual machine hosting service.

Then you took a long trip into the land of Docker, a new and exciting system for deploying services on machines. You learned how to write a Dockerfile so that Docker knows how to construct a service image. You learned several ways to deploy Docker images on our laptop or on a remote server. And you learned how to describe a multicontainer application using Docker Compose.

You're almost ready to wrap up this book. You've learned a lot along the way, but you have one final thing to cover.

While a core principle of test-driven development is to write the unit tests before writing the application, we've done it the other way around and put the chapter about unit testing at the end of this book, which is the next and final chapter in this book. That's not to say unit testing is unimportant because it is extremely important. But, to jump-start your knowledge of application development with Node.js and Express, we had to first cover that technology stack.