Deploying a Next.js App to AWS with CI/CD Pipelines (Step-by-Step)

The first time I deployed a Next.js app to production, it took me three days. Not because the app was complicated — it was a straightforward portfolio site. It took three days because I had no idea what I was doing with AWS, I'd never written a GitHub Actions workflow, and every tutorial I found either skipped the hard parts or assumed I already knew them. By the time I was done, I had a deployment pipeline I was genuinely proud of: push to main, GitHub Actions runs the build, tests pass, the app deploys to an EC2 instance behind CloudFront. Zero manual steps. Zero downtime deploys. Total cost: about $5/month. This guide is the one I wish had existed. We're going to deploy a Next.js app to AWS from scratch — EC2 for compute, CloudFront for CDN, GitHub Actions for CI/CD — with every step explained so you understand what you're building, not just copying commands. Why AWS Instead of Vercel? This is a fair question. Vercel is genuinely excellent for Next.js, and for most projects it's the right call. You push, it deploys. Done. AWS makes sense when: You need to control the infrastructure (compliance, data residency, custom VPC configuration) You're running other services (databases, queues, lambdas) in AWS and want everything in the same network You want to learn infrastructure skills that transfer to enterprise environments Your app has specific performance requirements that benefit from custom CloudFront configuration You're a freelancer or consultant who wants to bill separately for infrastructure If none of those apply to you, use Vercel. This guide is for when they do. The Architecture Here's what we're building: ┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐ │ GITHUB ACTIONS CI/CD │ │ │ │ Push to main → Build → Test → Deploy to EC2 │ └──────────────────────┬─────────────────────────────────┘ │ SSH deploy ▼ ┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐ │ AWS EC2 INSTANCE │ │ │ │ Ubuntu 22.04 LTS │ │ Node.js 20 + PM2 (process manager) │ │ N