How to make a website and deploy it?

Question

Software Deployment

I apologize for the stupid question and vague wording, I need to understand what to read and in which direction to dig. I want to write and deploy a spa site on react, with a database. I'm going to use nginx, digital ocean. Do I need to run 2 applications on my server: a frontend and a backend part that will interact with each other? Maybe use something else? For example, run in docker.