At a minimum you need access to the shell. Without the shell, you will work as if you were 20 years ago or more. If you will host just one web application, at least you also need a public ip or domain preferable with https
Also the usage of environment variables to avoid hardcoded values are required.
The following strategies assume that you have shell access and a public ip or domain.
let's not reinvent the wheel
Dokku
Dokku is an open-source platform-as-a-service (PaaS). If you're familiar with Heroku, you can consider Dokku a private Heroku that you manage.
Basically, after the installation, you will have a private git url in which if you push some standard code, the app will be deployed.
I don't know any other similar open source platform.
Buddy
https://buddy.works/pricing
In this platform you could automate some tasks. It is like a mini jenkins
Minimal manual implementation
- Create a github repository
- Add a Dockerfile to your source code
- Use environment variables instead hardcoded values of database connection in the source code
- Install docker and git in the server
- Start a mongodb using docker and volumes
- After tests on your localhost, push to github
- Enter to the cloud and clone the git repository
- Execute the
docker build
to generate the image
- Execute
docker run -p 80:xyz
. xyz* is the port of your application