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After a week of searching, I am not able to find a solution for an app engine deploy issue for my node.js application.

I have come to the point that I have replaced my original code with this "hello world" example for express. Running this in my local dev environment offline works well (as expected).

Then I deploy this app to my google app engine project online using the gcloud cli. That seems to work as well (no errors).

However, when I visit the app online, instead of seeing my app, I see a black page with this message: "Error: Server Error The server encountered an error and could not complete your request. Please try again in 30 seconds.". After some digging in the google cloud console logs, I find that the error seems to be "Error: Cannot find module '/workspace/server.js'" (see more info here). I do not use such a module myself, nor do I define such a path in any of my files.

Does anyone have an idea what might be going wrong and how I can fix it? I have deployed apps successfully recently, but I'm at a loss here...

Nick Machiels
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  • As others have suggested, You likely need to update your app.yaml file. Have you seen this post? https://stackoverflow.com/questions/63608035/error-cannot-find-module-workspace-server-js – Cadet Aug 14 '21 at 20:19

2 Answers2

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As Cadet pointed out correctly, the solution was to make some changes to my app.yaml file.

This page allowed me to find the needed handlers.

Thanks a lot, Cadet.

Nick Machiels
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In my case, I got carried away with my .gcloudignore file

I used .gcloudignore to ignore directories like bin, but I forgot that bin contained the file www which was the file run by my package.json "scripts">"start", this is the entry point for the app to begin running!

 {
  "name": "craft",
  "version": "0.0.0",
  "private": true,
  "scripts": {
    "start": "node ./bin/www",
  ...

If .gcloudignore ignores a directory, that directory is not deployed to Google App Engine, therefore I got the error (the app couldn't even be run)

Cannot find module '/workspace/bin/www'

(I assume I would get the same error locally if I deleted my bin folder fr my computer, I couldn't run the project locally either)

So the solution was to stop ignoring the bin folder from the deployments; remove (or comment-out) lines like the one below from my .gcloudignore file:

# bin/ <-- we need this folder

I know this is not the solution for the OP (OP says they needed changes to their app.yaml handlers) but it may help other people.

Nate Anderson
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