School Management System-Development Environment Architecture
Designed a cost-efficient and production-aligned development environment for a school management system backend. The setup leverages Docker for service isolation, Redis with BullMQ for background processing, and PM2 for process management, while securely exposing the local development server through a DigitalOcean VPS for external testing and real-world validation.
Built by Augustine Cobbold
Problem
During the MVP phase, there was a need for a reliable and production-aligned development environment without incurring high infrastructure costs. The system needed to support background processing, database persistence, and real-world internet access for testing, while still being flexible and affordable during early-stage development.
Solution
I set up a lightweight, production-aligned development environment by running PostgreSQL and Redis in Docker, using BullMQ for background job processing, and managing the Node.js backend with PM2 on my Windows machine. To enable real-world testing without deploying full infrastructure, I exposed the local backend to the internet through a DigitalOcean VPS port tunnel, allowing external access while keeping costs low during MVP development.
Architecture
VPS-Backed Local Development Deployment
Gallery
