This was so intimidating that I'm just recording what I did so I can remember. Thanks to Conan Lai @letmelol for onsite assistance and this Mopsled blog from 2015, which you should really read instead of my post which only details the terminal commands I used.

Getting started

(For more info See "NFSN Configuration" in Mopsled's post)

1. Make a NearlyFreeSpeech account.
2. Create a password
3. Create a RSA key if you don't have one, run ssh-keygen, which generates a public and private key. You'll need the public one
4. Go to Profile > Add SSH
5. To copy your public key, run pbcopy < ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub in the terminal
6. Paste your key into the input box, and click Add SSH Key

Preparing my app

My app is a Vue-cli with express server: At this point I had the front end in a different folder than the backend. Two different projects with two package.jsons!

1. In my front-end project, compile the build into a /dist or /build folder with npm run build
2. Copy and paste the folder into my server side project folder (express app)
3. In my app.js, add app.use(express.static ('dist/')) to point the backend at my public directory

Optional: In package.json, I could add a script to run the app run.sh

Deploying

(Also refer to Project Setup)

1. ssh to my server to get in
   ssh username_websiteNickName>@ssh.phx.nearlyfreespeech.net

2. To "upload" all your files to the server, copy everything into home/protected/ by running:

   rsync -av ./ username_websitenickname@ssh.phx.nearlyfreespeech.net:/home/protected

   ./ indicates "everything in this folder" as the local path, and username_websitenickname@ssh.phx.nearlyfreespeech.net:/home/protected is the remote path.

Alternately, I could use scp -r ./ username_websiteNickname@ssh.phx. nearlyfreespeech.net:/home/protected

Remember to keep a space between local and destination paths.

Apparently rsync is really cool because it only updates what's changed/new in your files.

Make It Live

1. See ["Configure NearlyFreeSpeech.net Daemon" and "Configure Proxy"] on Mopsled's post(http://www.mopsled.com/2015/run-nodejs-on-nearlyfreespeechnet/)

HELP: Getting a TLS certificate

Being the tutorial smartass I think I am, I thought I could create my own TLS certificate after reading this gist thread by running tls.sh in /home/protected. I was wrong. Now this task keeps running and I get an email everyday about how it failed. Does anyone know what I can do to enable https properly?

UPDATE:

In a total duhh moment I found that scheduled tasks are listed in the GUI.
I went to Sites, and on the left hand side I found a sidebar listing "Scheduled Tasks" where the tls.setup task was listed, with a "Remove" button to the right hand side.