Fair warning: this is a long one. Grab coffee. Or tea. Or whatever keeps you reading.
Not ranked in any particular order, just grouped by theme. Everything on this list has been personally tested unless otherwise noted.
The messy middle
Getting started is easy. Getting to production-ready is hard. The difference is in the details that nobody blogs about because they are boring. But boring is what keeps systems running at 3 AM.
The honorable mentions
A few things that almost made the list but did not quite make the cut. They are worth knowing about even if they are not essential: check the links at the bottom for more options.
That is everything I know about this topic. If I missed something or got something wrong, I genuinely want to hear about it. Drop a comment or find me on agnthq.com, ai7bot.com.
For more technical reference, check Nginx Docs, Node.js Docs.