Now that you can develop with Node.js, you need to learn how to get your apps off your local machine and into the world. Depending on what your app does will determine how you deploy it.

Packages

For CLI's, Libraries, Plugins, etc, you would publish these to NPM so othere devs can install it. The NPM CLI makes this easy. Let's take our CLI that we created and publish it.

First thing is to make sure you have a unique package name in the name field of package.json. NPM will let you know when you try to publish. Next, create a NPM account. Once you've done that, you need to login to NPM from your terminal with

npm login

We're now ready to publish. Just run:

npm publish

And that's it. Your CLI can now be installed with npm install [name].

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.

...And that's it!