TS2688: Cannot find type definition file for 'node' with @types/node installed

Question

I'm having a difficult time building a TypeScript application on Heroku.

My dependencies list includes a type definition for all of the packages I'm using:

"dependencies": {
    "@nestjs/common": "^4.5.1",
    "@nestjs/core": "^4.5.1",
    "@nestjs/microservices": "^4.5.1",
    "@nestjs/testing": "^4.5.1",
    "@nestjs/websockets": "^4.5.1",
    "@types/express": "^4.0.39",
    "@types/jest": "^21.1.8",
    "@types/json-schema": "^6.0.0",
    "@types/jsonwebtoken": "^7.2.5",
    "@types/mongoose": "^4.7.29",
    "@types/node": "^8.5.1",
    "@types/passport": "^0.4.2",
    "@types/passport-jwt": "^3.0.0",
    "@types/supertest": "^2.0.4",
    "chalk": "^2.3.0",
    "dotenv": "^4.0.0",
    "express-jwt": "^5.3.0",
    "global": "^4.3.2",
    "jsonwebtoken": "^8.1.0",
    "mongoose": "^4.13.7",
    "passport": "^0.4.0",
    "passport-jwt": "^3.0.1",
    "redis": "^2.8.0",
    "reflect-metadata": "^0.1.10",
    "rxjs": "^5.5.5",
    "tslint": "^5.8.0",
    "ts-node": "^4.0.2",
    "typescript": "^2.6.2"
  },

However, when building on Heroku, I get:

error TS2688: Cannot find type definition file for 'node'
error TS2307: Cannot find module 'http'

and more. My tsconfig.json sets the typeRoots as './node_modules/@types' and I get a successful build locally.

Why can't Heroku find these types?

Answer 1

Apparently Heroku wasn't picking up changes to my package.json file or had cached some portion of the build process that was excluding @type definitions that I had moved from devDependencies to dependencies.

I cleared the build cache as such:

$ heroku plugins:install heroku-repo
$ heroku repo:purge_cache -a [appname]
$ git commit --allow-empty -m "Purge cache"
$ git push heroku master

and everything works as expected.