Troubleshooting your dedicated Ethora server: 500 internal server error

Archived from the Ethora community forum. First posted on 27 January 2026; product details may have changed since. For current setup see Get Ethora and GitHub.

Taras Filatov (Ethora team) · 27 January 2026

Q: I installed Ethora server, no errors during installation and my uptime service shows green. However when I access app.ethoratest.com I see "500 Internal Server Error" message from Nginx:

1) Confirm where the 500 comes from

From the server:

curl -I https://app.ethoratest.com

If it’s a 500 from nginx (not the app), go to step 2. If it returns HTML from your app, go to step 3.

2) Nginx layer (most common with 500 on web domain)

Check nginx error log first:

sudo tail -n 200 /var/log/nginx/error.log

Look for:

upstream connection errors to the frontend (port or path mismatch)

connect() failed (111: Connection refused)

no live upstreams

If you see those, the frontend process is not running or nginx points to wrong upstream.

3) Frontend process health (PM2)

Check PM2:

pm2 ls

pm2 logs --lines 200

If frontend is missing or crashing, restart it from the deploy folder:

cd /home/ubuntu/ethora/deploy

sudo bash ./scripts/setup-node-services.sh

Then retry:

curl -I https://app.ethoratest.com

4) Verify frontend build + env

The app can 500 if the frontend dist/ or runtime env is missing.

Check:

ls -la /home/ubuntu/ethora/ethora-app-reactjs/dist

ls -la /home/ubuntu/ethora/deploy/generated/frontend.env

If dist/ is missing, rebuild:

cd /home/ubuntu/ethora/ethora-app-reactjs

npm ci

npm run build

sudo bash /home/ubuntu/ethora/deploy/scripts/setup-node-services.sh

5) Confirm the deployed paths are consistent

Make sure the target base is used, not the source repo:

cat /home/ubuntu/ethora/deploy/.deploy.env | grep -E "ROOT_DIR|FRONTEND_DIR|BACKEND_DIR"

Expected:

ROOT_DIR=/home/ubuntu/ethora

FRONTEND_DIR=/home/ubuntu/ethora/ethora-app-reactjs

If not, re-run:

cd /home/ubuntu/ethora-monoserver/deploy

sudo bash ./scripts/install.sh (with paths.base: /home/ubuntu/ethora)

sudo bash ./scripts/update.sh

6) Backend sanity check (if frontend calls backend on load)

Open the web domain in browser devtools → Network tab → see if API calls return 500/502.

Also check backend health directly:

curl -I https://api.ethoratest.com/v1/ping

If backend is unhealthy:

pm2 logs backend --lines 200

docker ps and check mongo/mysql/redis containers

docker logs deploy_mongo_1 --tail 200 (and mysql/redis if needed)