mydomain.com:8080 routing - Amazon Web Services, Route 53, EC2, MEAN - amazon-web-services

Question

I bought a domain name using amazon Route 53, created an elastic IP address and attached it to my Amazon EC2 instance running MEAN bitnami stack, then I created an S3 bucket for static web hosting "redirecting all requests" to the www.domainname.com.
However, when I go to my root domain the page loaded is the Bitnami Congratulations page: You are now running Bitnami MEAN 3.2.11-0 in the Cloud. I created a folder, uploaded my MEAN angular 2/express app and did node server.js and I can only access my web app on mydomain.com:8080 but anything else redirects to the Bitnami congratulations page. Which setting is it that is doing this? Is it an amazon setting? A Bitnami setting? or something in my server side code.
The only place I mention 8080 in my server code is here and it prints API running on 8080 when I run the server:
const port = process.env.PORT || '8080';
app.set('port', port);
const server = http.createServer(app);
server.listen(port, () => console.log(`API running on: ${port}` + ' or ' + process.env.PORT));

Answer 1

You have Apache running on your MEAN Stack. Apache is running on port 80/443 and, therefore, whenever you access your domain at port 80, Apache handle the request and shows you the "Bitnami Welcome Page".
In order to make your Angular/express application available at port 80 you need to configure Apache to redirect the requests to port 3000 (or port 8080, basically the port where your Express application is running). You could add under <VirtualHost _default_:80> and <VirtualHost _default_:443> sections in the file /opt/bitnami/apache2/conf/bitnami/bitnami.conf the line below:
ProxyPass /bitnami !
ProxyPass / http://127.0.0.1:3000/
ProxyPassReverse / http://127.0.0.1:3000/
After that, you will need to restart Apache running:
sudo /opt/bitnami/ctlscript.sh restart apache
You can find more information at:
https://docs.bitnami.com/aws/infrastructure/mean/

Answer 2

Bitnami by default launches with an http config here: root/opt/apache2/conf/httpd.conf. The apache2 server pointed at a root directory containing html with an index.html that contains its Congratulations page. Using sudo /opt/bitnami/ctlscript.sh stop killed this server and all other services it had running by default on startup so when I type node server.js all traffic now goes to my Angular 2 app.

Answer 3

Use NGINX to reverse proxy all trafic from http://www.domainname.com to address where your node server is running ( http://localhost:8080).
Here is the sample NGINX configuration for such a use case.
To install NGINX follow one of tutorials on digitalocean.com depending upon your server OS.