Sanity Dashboard — Project Description

Overview

A beginner-to-intermediate DevOps project demonstrating the complete lifecycle of a modern web application — from development to cloud deployment — built with React, Docker, GitHub Actions, and AWS EC2.

Created as part of an ongoing DevOps and Cloud Engineering learning journey, this project implements a real-world CI/CD workflow: every push to main is automatically built, containerized, and deployed to a live server with zero manual intervention.

Architecture

Tech Stack

• Frontend: React, Vite
• Version Control: Git, GitHub
• Containerization: Docker (multi-stage builds)
• CI/CD: GitHub Actions
• Cloud Platform: AWS EC2 (Ubuntu, t2.micro)
• Web Server: Nginx

Key Highlights

• Multi-stage Docker build — separate build and production stages, compiling the React app with Node before serving the static assets through a lightweight Nginx image.
• CI Pipeline — automatically checks out the code and validates the Docker build on every push to main.
• CD Pipeline — uses GitHub Secrets and SSH-based deployment (appleboy/ssh-action) to connect to EC2, pull the latest code, rebuild the image, and restart the container automatically.
• Cloud Infrastructure — a Free Tier AWS EC2 instance provisioned and configured with security groups for SSH, HTTP, and custom ports.
• Zero-touch deployment — no manual server interaction required after setup; a single git push takes code from a local machine to a live public endpoint.

What I Learned

Linux fundamentals, SSH, Docker networking, Nginx configuration, Git/GitHub workflows, GitHub Actions pipelines, AWS EC2 provisioning, and infrastructure automation principles.

Future Improvements

• Docker Compose for multi-container orchestration
• Custom domain with HTTPS (Let's Encrypt)
• Nginx as a reverse proxy
• Prometheus + Grafana monitoring
• Terraform for Infrastructure as Code
• Kubernetes (EKS / K3s) for orchestration
• Multi-environment deployments (staging/production)