Deploying NestJS Apps to Zeit Now

Mark Pieszak

Published in

Trilon

4 min readJul 17, 2019

Originally published on the Trilon Blog on July 17, 2019.

Part 1 in a series of Articles about Deploying NestJS to Production.

In this article we’ll be looking at how to deploy NestJS applications to the cloud platform Zeit Now in only a few minutes!

See the “Hello World” NestJS + Zeit Now live demo:
NestJS-Zeit.Now.sh
You can find the Github code example here

What is Zeit “Now” ?

Zeit Now is a cloud platform for serverless deployment. It’s an incredibly simple, easy to use platform that allows you to deploy anything from static websites to server/serverless application instantly, scale automatically, all with minimal configuration.

This includes front-end applications (Angular/React/Vue/etc), or any backend of your choosing — Go, Node.js, Python and everything in-between!

NestJS is a Node.js framework after all, so how can we take advantage of an incredible Cloud platform like Now, and deploy our applications ?

Getting setup

NOTE: In this demonstration, we’ll be showcasing a new NestJS application generated by the CLI, but if you prefer to use an existing NestJS application — feel free — and just skip ahead !

Generate a new NestJS Application

For demo purposes, let’s make sure we have the latest NestJS CLI installed — and create a New application.

$ npm i -g @nestjs/cli 
$ nest new PROJECT_NAME

Now let’s cd into the newly created directory and open up our IDE. At this point we have a simple generated NestJS Application.

Setting up Zeit Now

$ npm i -g now

Make sure you’re logged into the Now CLI (or create an account before logging in).

$ now login
# enter your username and password

Ok great! We have a “hello world” NestJS application & Now setup, where do we go from here?

Typically with Now, deployments are as simple as typing now in your terminal.

But that alone won’t work for our NestJS application.

Now lets you configure your Deployment Configuration via a now.json file (typically found in the root of a project).

Now.json configuration

With this now.json configuration file, we can control many aspects of our deployment:

Deployment / Project Name
Aliases (ie: your domain URL)
Build setup
Routing
Serving static assets
much more…

At the root of your application, create a now.json file and add the JSON code below.

{ 
  "version": 2, 
  "name": "nestjs-now", 
  "builds": [
    { "src": "dist/main.js", "use": "@now/node" }
   ],
  "routes": [
    { "src": "/(.*)", "dest": "dist/main.js" }
   ]
}

What is this configuration doing?

Builds

On the line "use": "@now/node", we are telling the Now builder to take the file dist/main.js as an entry point for a Node.js function, building its dependencies, and bundling them into a Lambda.
Let’s remember that at the end of the day, NestJS compiles down to JavaScript and runs like a standard Node.js server
More info on @now/node here

Routes

We want to make sure that all routing /(.*) is handling by the API routes we setup within our NestJS application, so we're just telling Now where our main file is.
More info on Now routes here

Building & Deploying

Now that we have everything setup — let’s Deploy it to Now!

NestJS is a TypeScript-based Node.js framework, so we’re going to need to make sure we build it for Production (via npm run build) and then we can let Now do its thing (via now) !!

$ npm run build && now # ------------
# SAMPLE OUTPUT
# -------------> zeit-now-nestjs@0.0.1 build /Users/Documents/Trilon/zeit-now-nestjs 
> tsc -p tsconfig.build.json 
> Deploying ~/Documents/Trilon/zeit-now-nestjs under trilon-io 
> Using project nestjs-now 
> Synced 2 files (462.27KB) [2s] 
> https://nestjs-zeit.now.sh/ [v2] [928ms] 
> Ready! Aliased to https://nestjs-zeit.now.sh/ [in clipboard] [43s]

NestJS deployed to the ☁ !

If you look above (or in your terminal if you’re following along), we can see there was a URL outputted in the terminal! It was automatically copied to our clipboard, so go ahead and open up a Browser and take a look!!

“Hello World” in all of its magical glory…

NestJS Zeit Now deployment example

NOTE: Inspecting the page itself we can see that it was infact served up by an Express server, just as a default NestJS application is setup to do!

There we have it!

In just a few minutes and one small json file - we took our NestJS application to the cloud with Zeit Now!