Deploying a MEAN Stack App Without a Cloud Provider

Many people think you need an AWS or Azure account to learn deployment and CI/CD. That’s a misconception. If you have VirtualBox and GitHub Actions , you have everything you need to build a fully automated pipeline. In this guide, I will show you how to deploy a MEAN stack application on a local Linux VM(there is no major difference for the MERN stack). This setup works on any Linux environment, whether it's a dedicated server or a VM running on your laptop. 🏗️ The Architecture We are using a monorepo approach, meaning both the Angular frontend and Node.js backend live in the same repository. Here is how the flow works: Push code to the production branch. GitHub Actions builds the Docker images. Images are pushed to Docker Hub . A Self-Hosted Runner on your VM pulls the latest images and restarts the containers. Nginx acts as a reverse proxy to route traffic. If you are curious about how this differs from cloud-specific hosting, check out my previous post on Hosting a Node.js Server in