Servers

For API's and background tasks that operation on API's or databases, you'd deploy these to a hosting provider like AWS, Heroku, Google Cloud, etc. Let's deploy our Server! We'll be using Heroku for this as its really easy to deploy an app.

First create a heroku account and then install the cli. Next, we have to tell heroku how to start our app. We can add a start script in our package.json. We also have to tell heroku what version of Node.js we want to use.

"scripts": {
  "start": "node ./path/to/server.mjs"
},

"engines": {
  "node": "14.x"
}

We have to change a few things to ensure our Server won't crash when deployed. Right now we have a hard coded port, we need to change that to an environment variable that Heroku will inject at runtime. We can use process.env.PORT. Lastly, make sure we're not checking in the node_modules folder into git by adding it to the .gitignore file. If you don't have one, then create one and this

/node_modules
npm-debug.log
.DS_Store
/*.env

These are just some common files and folders that we don't want tracked in git. We'll be deploying to heroku with git, so we don't want these files in heroku either. Commit your changes to git, and then login to the heroku CLI

heroku login

Next, create a new heroku app:

heroku create

Finally, push our server to heroku via git

git push heroku main

You'll see the build output of heroku deploying your app. Once its done, we can try the live URL.

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