I'm currently using NextJS and to run a production build, I use npm run build followed by npm run start. This all works well on my local machine.
However, I need to deploy this app on an offline machine where I may not have an internet connection to install all the node packages.
I've taken a look at npm pkg and npm pack utilities, but not quite sure which is the best one to use in the context of a nextjs app.
Would appreciate any advice on the best way to do this.
Edit: thinking along the lines of how I would build my maven project and have a .jar output which I can use to deploy to any other machine as a single deployable file.
Using gradle and java, I can build and publish (into a local repository) various versions. If a deployment has issues, I can reroll by deploying a prior version.
I can't find anything comparable for NPM applications, e.g. vue.
I foun npm pack which seems to build something that I can later install via npm install.
But I could not find out I then "run" the application. Are the any good documentations?
Thanks in advance.
Unline Jave Javascript doesn't compile into anything (because its interpreted). This means that all you need it the source code.
A basic node app source code will look something like this
main.js # entrypoint
packege.json # dependencies
src/ # application codebase
So if you like to create an artifact that can be deployed to a server you need only to download the dependencies (that's what the npm install is for) and that's it basically.
Now a node_module directory will be created
main.js # entrypoint
packege.json # dependencies
src/ # application codebase
node_module/ # dependencies codebase
You can run the application with node run main.js. But if you are creating an artifact you should bundle (zip) all the files and upload then to a file server (this will be the closest thing to .war in this flow)
You can now unzip and run the node application on a server that has NodeJS installed.
I'm new to node.js. After creating modularized project with express, tests, .nvmrc etc. it's finally time to deploy the app. How it should be done? in java you bundle your project into a single file, self containing and you put in into a server with some configuration. what about node.js?
Should i just copy the whole directory with sources and node_modules to production machine and use systemd, pm2 or other process manager to just run it? but i heard some of the dependencies might be system-dependend so they may work incorrectly
or should i copy only sources and run npm install --production on the production machine? but this way the deployment is only possible when npm repositories are online. also it takes time to build the application and it has to be done on all machines in the cluster. also what about quickly rolling back to previous version in case there is some bug? again, time and online npm repos are needed
another option is to build a docker image. but it seems awkward that the only way to easily and safely deploy the app is using third party technology
how it's being done in real life scenarios?
sure don't copy the whole directory especially node_modules.
all the packages installed on your system should be installed with --save option example: npm install --save express if you do so you will have in your package.json the dependencies required for your project whether they are dev dependencies or production dependencies.
I don't know what your project structure looks like, but as a node application you have to run npm init . in your project to setup the package.json file and then you can start adding your dependencies with --save.
usually we use git
version control system
to deploy to the server, first we push our code to a git repository then we pull from it to the server git
you have to add .gitignore in your project and ignore node_modules from being committed to your git repository.
then you can pull to your server and run npm install on the server. and sure you need to launch your web server to serve your application example ngnix
you can try Heroku for an easy deployment, all you have to do is to setup your project with Heroku, and when you push your code, Heroku manages the deployment . Heroku
I'm trying to build a package (zip) using grunt in Jenkins (though Jenkins is kind of irrelevant at this stage).
Basically the code is checked out of git, and I run
npm install --production
but grunt needs the files installed locally.
So I run
npm install
But now I have all the grunt packages in the node_modules directory.
As part of the grunt build I simply want to copy the node_modules directory into the package.
Am I headed down the right track with trying to package my code using grunt?
Or should I be using grunt to only run jslint, unit tests etc and use this to package: https://github.com/zeit/pkg
The output is another tool that I will be calling from the command line.
I'm using grunt and also grunt plugins like grunt-contrib-copy, grunt-contrib-mincss (that listed as npm dependencies for my application).
Also I don't commit npm_modules folder and public folder, where all generated files are. And I can't figure out how to build my app (I have grunt build command) after deploy and setup my server (it's already looking for public folder).
I saw some stuff like grunt-heroku-deploy, but it seems me a bad idea to commit before upload. Maybe there are some gentle decisions... Any thoughts?
npm has a support for a postinstall step (among many others) that might be just what you're looking for.
The node.js heroku buildpack runs this command when you push to heroku to resolve build dependencies:
$ npm install --production
https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/nodejs-support#build-behavior
If you take a look at the npm documentation, you can setup a series of scripts to run either before or after anyone runs npm install for your package. It's configured in the scripts property of package.json. The scripts property allows to run custom scripts (including grunt) when certain things happen in a package's lifecycle.
For example, to echo some text and run the grunt command whenever anyone (including Heroku) runs npm install, add this to your package.json:
{
...
"scripts": {
"postinstall": "echo postinstall time; ./node_modules/grunt-cli/bin/grunt <your task name>"
},
...
}
https://npmjs.org/doc/scripts.html
Important caveats:
You might have to change the path to the grunt binary in the postinstall script, check the error output if the grunt command doesn't execute.
grunt and grunt-cli must be listed as a dependency in your package.json so it gets installed by Heroku. Listing them under devDependencies is not sufficient since Heroku won't install those. Also, note that Heroku won't install it as a global package so to execute it on Heroku you're going to have to use a relative path (as it is configured above).
If this doesn't work (you'll probably need to fiddle with the relative paths a bit), then you might want to consider writing your own custom buildpack for Heroku.
Update
As of 0.4, the grunt package no longer contains the grunt binary, which is now part of the grunt-cli package. The answer has been updated to reflect this.
This looks like it will largely be solved when the Heroku Platorm API slug and release features make it into the mainline. At that point, you can build your code locally (or on a ci server), package it up and send it to heroku via an API call and release it from there.
This is still in the beta period and was only announced on December 19, 2013.
https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/platform-api-deploying-slugs
I was never super happy with how many people seemed ok with checking in your generated code into git or the NPM postinstall hook. :(
Plus from a philosophical stance, doing a build during a release is simply another potential failure point.
Just for fun: Since that's not finalized yet, here's a bash script I threw together you can use for the time being to build your code on a deployment branch, commit it, deploy it to heroku and then remove the deployment branch. (I really am not a fan of bash deployment scripts, so I'm really looking forward to the platform API additions)
#!/bin/bash
set -e
# Delete current deploy branch
git branch -D deploy
# Create new deploy branch based on master
git checkout -b deploy
# Grunt comands to build our site
grunt build:production
# the dist/ directory is in my .gitignore, so forcibly add it
git add -f dist/
git commit -m "Deploying to Heroku"
# Push it up to heroku, the -f ensures that heroku won't complain
git push heroku -f deploy:master
# Switch it back to master
git checkout master
Grunt (et al.) is a build tool, not (really) something you should be packaging up and running on production. A different approach would be to use Grunt to prepare your project locally (or better on a CI server) before only pushing the built files to Heroku. As already mentioned Heroku will do an npm install on your app after its pushed which should be enough on its own to finally prepare your app.
I have it set up so that the Grunt derived/built Heroku app lives in a totally separate Git repo to my main app source code repo. So that when I do a grunt deploy it optimises and copies the relevant files to the Heroku repo, tidies it up (git add -A etc.) and then git push heroku master (or whatever).
It seems like a cleaner separation of concerns if your live servers are only responsible for running a pre-built app package.
YMMV of course, and the accepted answer above is totally valid too ... especially on a well understood and stable live environment like Heroku.
Heroku buildpack works fine for me. Great stuff.
To get this working with grunt 4.0 I followed the instructions here https://discussion.heroku.com/t/grunt-on-heroku/98/2 . The only change I had to make was to remove the path to grunt as using unix style slashes would make it fail in windows and vice versa. Luckily you don't even need to specify the path as NPM will look for grunt in the node_modules/.bin folder https://npmjs.org/doc/scripts.html#path.
make sure you have both grunt and grunt-cli installed locally in your package.json even if grunt tells you to install the cli globally: $: npm i -S grunt grunt-cli
add a postinstall step to your package.json that looks like this: "postinstall": "grunt prod"
The npm postinstall step is probably your best option, since you can invoke grunt from there. But you should also check out a custom buildpack, such as heroku-buildpack-nodejs-grunt.
This post is Rails-specific but I don't see why you couldn't use it with any back-end framework and just swap the Ruby buildpack with whatever you're using.
The solution is basically to use multi buildpacks, and have the Node/Grunt buildpack run grunt build for you right on Heroku.
Significantly, this solution does not have you check build artifacts into version control. (Yay!!!)
http://www.angularonrails.com/deploy-angular-rails-single-page-application-heroku/