Healthcare platform: multi-environment delivery on VPS

The problem

The team needed separate, repeatable environments and reliable routing between a Next.js front end, a FastAPI backend and supporting services.

Approach

• Set up Dev / QA / Prod environments with Nginx reverse proxy per environment.
• Split routing cleanly between Next.js internal routes and FastAPI endpoints.
• Role-based access for admin, clinical, front-desk and billing staff.
• Diagnosed a production 502 caused by large JWT headers and tuned Nginx proxy buffers.

Outcome

• Consistent promotion path from Dev to QA to Prod.
• Root-caused and fixed an admin-only outage at the proxy layer.