DEV Community

Cover image for How to deploy your NestJS apps on Vercel
Duc Le
Duc Le

Posted on

How to deploy your NestJS apps on Vercel

With my little knowledge, Vercel isn’t a platform for backend services, and companies often don’t pick Vercel for their deployments. According to Vercel, they claim Vercel is the platform for frontend developers.

But even frontend developers have their own desire to create their own APIs to serve their experiments ( like me ). And I often pick **NestJS **to write APIs due to its fast development and build time, easy to learn ( but hard to master )

If you deployed **React **for **NextJS **apps on **Vercel **before, you can find it pretty convenient to deploy because of Vercel’s presets for libraries and frameworks. But for **NestJS **apps, **Vercel **will recognize your repository with Others preset, and when you try to deploy it with default settings, this will happen:

Image description

To solve this is fairly easy, what you have to do is create the vercel.json file in root folder and write this:

Image description

The vercel.json configuration file lets you configure, and override the default behavior of Vercel from within your project, find more details here

Build object definition:

  • src (String): A glob expression or pathname. If more than one file is resolved, one build will be created per matched file. It can include * and **.
  • use (String): An npm module to be installed by the build process.

Route object definition:

  • src: A PCRE-compatible regular expression that matches each incoming pathname (excluding query string).
  • methods: A set of HTTP method types. If no method is provided, requests with any HTTP method will be a candidate for the route.
  • dest: A destination pathname or full URL, including query string, with the ability to embed capture groups as $1, $2…

Run Vercel deploy again, you can see that Vercel successfully deployed our apps with build outputs:

Image description

Image description
[

*Note: my vercel.json is just a basic example on how it works, you should find the configuration that best suits you and your app

You can check out my source code here](https://github.com/leduc1901/nestjs-jwt-auth)

Last Words

Although my content is free for everyone, but if you find this article helpful, you can buy me a coffee here

Top comments (11)

Collapse
 
nicostubi profile image
nicostubi

Nice article.

The config you wrote allowed me to pass the problem of the public directory.
However I'm using graphql and I have the following error when browsing the app:

`2023-01-10T17:26:08.853Z baf32391-0925-4f77-b503-ea1ba0c55cee ERROR Cannot find module 'src/common/gql.type'
Require stack:

  • /var/task/src/products/products.resolver.js
  • /var/task/src/products/products.module.js
  • /var/task/src/app.module.js
  • /var/task/src/main.js 2023-01-10T17:26:08.853Z baf32391-0925-4f77-b503-ea1ba0c55cee ERROR Did you forget to add it to "dependencies" in package.json? RequestId: baf32391-0925-4f77-b503-ea1ba0c55cee Error: Runtime exited with error: exit status 1 Runtime.ExitError`

Any ideas how to solve this? The Vercel documentation mentions some potential issues around case, bug my imports are correct with gql.type and when I look into the source folder that is deployed, the fil is present at the correct location.

Cheers,
Nicolas

Collapse
 
oyugoobonyo profile image
Oyugo Obonyo

Did you find a way of fixing this? I'm getting a similar error

Collapse
 
nicostubi profile image
nicostubi

No, I finally used Azure

Thread Thread
 
oyugoobonyo profile image
Oyugo Obonyo

I fixed it by reverting to relative imports over everything.In your code you had an
like import {} from src/common.gql.type. Changing it to import {} from ../common.gql.type would probably work.

Collapse
 
amit123 profile image
Amit Thakur

This Serverless Function has crashed. Your connection is working correctly. Vercel is working correctly. 500: INTERNAL_SERVER_ERROR Code: FUNCTION_INVOCATION_FAILED ID: bom1::sgk4v-1711014022883-1e9ed54f4c37

Collapse
 
saralufi profile image
Sara Lufi

Thanks for this post. If you don't mind, can you do one post on how to deploy a NestJS application which is inside an Nx monorepository that already has a NextJS app or ReactJS app.

Collapse
 
artemshchirov profile image
Artem Shchirov

Hi! Did you find how to do it?

Collapse
 
shafinthedeveloper profile image
Shafin The Developer

I wrote this article using Vercel CLI.

todayunboxed.com/deploy-your-nestj...

Anyone can check this out!

Collapse
 
huyydinhh profile image
HuyyDinhh

pls, help me

Image description

Collapse
 
es404020 profile image
es404020

Any fix to the bug

Collapse
 
lfelipessilva profile image
Luís Felipe

Thank you! i just want to ask you to put the OPTIONS method on your vercel.json file. if it is not there, the browser cannot make preflight requests, so you cannot make json requests and etc