Heroku Node Buildpack for Rails 5 / Angular 2 app

Question

I am trying to deploy a Rails 5 api with an Angular 2 front end, with the Angular code living an frontend folder inside of the main Rails project.

I was able to deploy using this tutorial ( https://www.angularonrails.com/deploy-angular-2rails-5-app-heroku/ ), and specifically this custom Heroku buildpack ( https://github.com/jasonswett/heroku-buildpack-nodejs/stargazers ).

While this buildpack is absolutely awesome for existing, I am a little uncomfortable depending on the custom implementation in the long run. It also means I have to rename my frontend folder to client .

Is there a way to use the main Heroku Node buildpack, and somehow pass the path of my Angular frontend folder as an ENV variable? How would I go about doing this?

I've read through the Github conversations here ( https://github.com/heroku/heroku-buildpack-nodejs/pull/192 ) and here ( https://github.com/heroku/heroku-buildpack-nodejs/pull/203 ) but can't make heads or tails of it.

Please help!

Answer 1

the trick is to place a package.json at root with the following:

{
    "scripts": {
        "postinstall": "cd frontend && npm install"
    }
}

substitute "frontend" with whatever folder the angular / node app is in.

See github issues discussion here: https://github.com/heroku/heroku-buildpack-nodejs/issues/323#issuecomment-227520485