This is a complete, copy‑pasteable guide for shipping a backend app to a single Linux server using Docker Compose, with a GitHub Actions pipeline that builds the image, scans it, and deploys it over SSH.
It is written to be language- and framework-agnostic. The examples use a Node/TypeScript API with PostgreSQL, Redis, and a background worker, but the same shape works for Python/Django, Go, Java/Spring, Ruby, etc. Anywhere you see your-app, your-org, your-server-ip, or example.com, substitute your own values.
Every file is included in full, and every non-obvious line is explained. The last section — Common errors and how to fix them — is the part most guides skip, and it is the part that will actually save your afternoon. All of it comes from a real deployment, mistakes included.
1. The mental model (read this first)
Before any YAML, understand the shape of what we're building. There are only three places anything lives:
