Deploying Angular Universal 9 to Google App Engine

Question

I am not sure the situation has been changed but it seems I got stuck with the versions I am using. Previously, in Angular 7, we were able to generate server files for Angular Universal at the root level so we could have node main.js in app yaml and Google App Engine just found the way to run our web application. It seems this is not possible anymore for Angular 9.

We are using Angular SSR for our production web site. It compiles all the server files in /dist-server folder. There is a docker file to deploy it on Google App Engine:

FROM node:12-alpine as buildContainer
WORKDIR /app
COPY ./package.json ./package-lock.json /app/
RUN npm install
COPY . /app
RUN npm run build:ssr // This will create dist/ and dist-server/ folders in the docker
FROM node:12-alpine
WORKDIR /app
COPY --from=buildContainer /app/package.json /app
COPY --from=buildContainer /app/dist /app/dist
COPY --from=buildContainer /app/dist-server /app/dist-server
EXPOSE 4000
CMD ["npm", "run", "serve:ssr"]

In package.json we have:

"serve:ssr": "node dist-server/main.js",

In order to start the deployment, we type gcloud app deploy in the terminal and everything works fine for this process. The main problem is this takes almost 25 mins to finish. The main bottleneck for the time consuming part is the compiling.

I thought we could have compiled the repo on our local dev machine, and copy only dist/ and dist-server folder to the docker and add node dist-server/main.js to run our web application in the docker file. Whenever I tried to copy only dist and dist-server folder. I got below error message:

COPY failed: stat /var/lib/docker/tmp/docker-builder{random numbers}/dist: no such file or directory

I also tried to compile the main.js which is the main server file for angular universal at the same level as app.yaml . I assumed this is required according to Google App Engine Node JS deployment rule since there is an example repo from Google . I cannot compile our main.js file into the root folder, it gives below error message:

An unhandled exception occurred: Output path MUST not be project root directory!

So I am looking for a solution to which does not require Google App Engine to rebuild our repo (since we can do this in our dev machine and upload the compiled files for the sake of time saving) to make the deployment process faster.

Thanks for your help

Answer 1

I have found that the .dockerignore file had dist and dist-server folder in it. I have removed those entries. I am able to compile and deploy the docker file on google app engine now.