Exercise 05: Going Live — The Agentic Crew Hands-On Guide

Overview

Your app works on localhost. It looks great. But try sending the URL to a friend — you can't. localhost means "this computer, right here." To everyone else in the world, your app doesn't exist. This chapter fixes that.

You're going to rent a small server, point a domain at it, and deploy your Travel Bucket List for the world to see — with HTTPS, automatic restarts, and a proper setup. Your AI agent will operate the infrastructure directly: provisioning the server, SSHing in to configure it, and calling the Cloudflare API to set up DNS.

Your agent just connected to a remote computer via SSH and ran commands on it. This is the same thing a system administrator does — but instead of remembering arcane commands and flags, you described what you wanted in plain English. Infrastructure-as-conversation.
— from the exercise

What you'll build

By the end of this exercise

✓ A real Ubuntu server provisioned on Hetzner Cloud

✓ SSH access with hardened security (non-root user, firewall)

✓ Your app deployed and running via Node.js

✓ Caddy reverse proxy with automatic HTTPS (Let's Encrypt)

✓ DNS configured via the Cloudflare API — no dashboards

✓ systemd service for automatic restarts and boot persistence

✓ A live URL you can share with anyone in the world

Key concepts

Terms you'll learn

Term What it means

VPS Virtual Private Server — a small computer you rent in a data centre

SSH Secure Shell — a way to connect to and control a remote server

Reverse proxy Software that sits in front of your app and handles incoming traffic

HTTPS Encrypted web traffic — the padlock icon in your browser

DNS The phone book of the internet — maps domain names to IP addresses

A record The most basic DNS entry — maps a domain name directly to an IP address

systemd Linux's service manager — keeps your app running even after reboots

What's covered

Sections in this exercise

01 What You'll Build

02 What You'll Need

03 Why Self-Host?

04 Create Your Server

05 The Agent SSHes In

06 Harden the Server

07 Deploy the App

08 Set Up the Web Server

09 Point Your Domain with the Cloudflare API

10 Make It Survive Reboots

11 Test the Full Stack

What just happened

The agent's role expanded. In Chapter 4, it wrote code. In this chapter, it operated infrastructure — provisioning servers, SSHing into remote machines, calling APIs, managing system services. The agent went from pair programmer to DevOps engineer.