I have been touching up on NodeBB and am really liking it so far. I have set it up locally on my machine (Mac) and have been experimenting with it.
My question is how would I go about deploying this to a hosting service and transferring all of my local files to a service like Digital Ocean? A simple copy and paste?
This will be a new small forum so D.O looked like it offered the cheapest solution. Do they offer other discounts as well?
Would anyone recommend a different provider? I looked up Heroku and Modulus but their prices seemed a bit too steep for me for now.
Any help is appreciated, looking forward to using NodeBB in my future deployments!
Edit: I am using the Redis DB, thank you!
Thanks for the reply! I have my forum setup with the categories and themes setup. If I wanted to port all this to a new hosting service that would be as simple as what you said? Zipping it up and unzipping the files onto the server?
I currently have no users other than my administrator account.
Just take note of the modifications you've made to your local setup. As long as you didn't make any code modifications, you should just be able to clone the repo right on the remote instance you have set up (and if you want to be really sure the setup is exactly the same, just checkout the same SHA hash). I think the one file you might have to copy is the config.json file in the root directory.
Before you start it up, the critical part would be the database. You didn't mention if you were using redis or mongo, so you'd just have to look up a way to transfer the database around:
upload the files to a directory,
put dump.rdb in /etc ..
make sure the file has right perms, or it will get nulled when you restart redis.
restart redis check dump.rdb hasn't changed. start nodebb
I would think it would work unless npm install compiles differently during the setup phase on another OS 
