Week 1 Linux Fundamentals & Provisioning Your First VPS Server
- Session 1: Web hosting landscape: Shared hosting vs PaaS (Vercel/Render) vs Raw Cloud VPS (DigitalOcean/Hetzner). Provisioning an Ubuntu server from scratch.
- Session 2: Essential Linux terminal navigation, user privilege isolation, SSH key generation, and basic UFW firewall protection.
Week 2 Docker Primitives, Containerizing Apps & Multi-Stage Builds
- Session 3: Why containers solve "it works on my machine": Images vs Containers, writing clean
Dockerfiles, and understanding container layers. - Session 4: Multi-stage Docker builds: Reducing image sizes from 1GB+ down to under 80MB for production web runtimes.
Week 3 Multi-Container Apps with Docker Compose & Persistent Databases
- Session 5: Multi-container orchestration: Writing
docker-compose.ymlto run Frontend, Backend API, and a persistent PostgreSQL database concurrently. - Session 6: Docker networking, volume mounting (avoiding data loss on container restarts), and safe environment variable handling.
Week 4 Reverse Proxies, Free SSL & Zero-Downtime Live Deployment
- Session 7: Domain DNS records (A/CNAME), pointing domains to VPS, and setting up Nginx/Traefik reverse proxy with automated free Let's Encrypt SSL certificates.
- Session 8 (Live Deployment Lab): Deploy Your Live App — Every student deploys their own full-stack containerized web app onto a live domain with automated restart policies.