LoopNotes

The project app of The DevOps Loop — learn DevOps from zero in 112 days, 4 short lessons a day.

LoopNotes is a tiny notes app. On its own it's boring. That's the point: we take this one small app all the way from a laptop to a production Kubernetes cluster, and every step teaches one real DevOps skill.

Follow the series on Instagram and Threads @thedevopsloop. Each build day adds the next step to this repo.

Run it (you only need Node.js 18+)

git clone https://github.com/thedevopsloop/loopnotes.git
cd loopnotes
node server.js

Open http://localhost:3000. No npm install needed: zero dependencies.

Setting	Env variable	Default
Port	PORT	3000
Where notes are saved	DATA_FILE	./data/notes.json
Environment name (dev / staging / production)	APP_ENV	dev

Health check: curl http://localhost:3000/health → {"status":"ok","env":"dev"}

The journey (tick these off with us)

• Week 1 — It works on my laptop · Ep 5: meet LoopNotes · Ep 6: why it breaks on a server
• Week 1 build day — run LoopNotes on a Linux machine (WSL, Multipass or a cloud VM)
• Week 2 — run it as a Linux service with systemd, read its logs
• Week 3 — reach it from a browser: ports, DNS, nginx in front of it
• Week 4 — every change goes through Git and pull requests
• Week 5 — a Bash script to deploy and back up
• Weeks 6–7 — package it with Docker, add a database with Docker Compose
• Week 8 — CI/CD with GitHub Actions: test, build and ship on every push
• Weeks 9–10 — deploy to AWS behind a load balancer
• Week 11 — the whole AWS setup as code with Terraform
• Weeks 12–14 — run it on Kubernetes: Deployments, Services, Ingress, autoscaling
• Week 15 — monitoring with Prometheus and Grafana
• Week 16 — GitOps, security, and your portfolio

How to use this repo

• Following along? Star the repo, then fork it and do each build day in your fork.
• Stuck? Open an issue with what you ran and what you saw.
• Each week gets its own folder of notes and a tagged release, so you can jump to any step.

License

MIT. Use it, break it, learn from it.