How to use NPM to package a deployment?

Question

I've developed an Angular website that lives in a Node-based project. Gulp is used to build sources into development and production versions of the site. The project includes an ExpressJS server that can serve either the dev or prod versions of the files. Now I want to build and deploy the site in CI fashion.

I have a private NPM registry that I'm able to publish the entire project module to. The easy route would be:

1. In the build environment, check out the project repository
2. npm install
3. pass tests
4. npm publish
5. In the production environment..
6. npm install project
7. build for production
8. Run the server over the newly built prod files

But this doesn't seem right. Shouldn't I output the production files as part of the build process, and publish these as a versioned artifact with NPM? Are there acceptable, different ways to publish an NPM module for development and deployment?

Or am I stuck building my sources in the production environment? Doesn't this defeat the purpose of NODE_ENV=production?

Answer 1

It depends where you are hosting your server.

If you want to deploy to heroku, you can follow https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/getting-started-with-nodejs#introduction and install the gulp build task https://github.com/appstack/heroku-buildpack-nodejs-gulp. Basically, you will push the version you want to deploy to heroku's git server and it will automatically trigger the build process for dev or prod and start the express server. Assuming you are already using git for your project, it is only a matter of adding a new remote.

If you want to deploy to Amazon's elastic beanstalk, it's a little bit more complicated but it all boils down to pushing your application code to the service and this will trigger the build process in the host instance.

If you want to deploy it on your environment you could still use git push and git hook to trigger the deployment. Check out How can I automatically deploy my app after a git push ( GitHub and node.js)? for various implementations.

As for your question "Shouldn't I output the production files as part of the build process, and publish these as a versioned artifact with NPM": you could, but this is not what most people do. As long as your build process is repeatable, there is no reason to package and publish the built version of your app. I am assuming here that your are building an application and not a reusable library in which case it would be a different story.