Question

NetsJS not found during App Platform build

Posted on January 10, 2024
Building on DigitalOcean Deployment DigitalOcean App Platform
Asked by Gabor Rendes

We have a NestJS based backend using the App Platform.

Deployments were working fine until today, where we got the following error during build:

[2024-01-10 14:23:15] │ Running custom build command: yarn build
[2024-01-10 14:23:15] │ yarn run v1.22.21
[2024-01-10 14:23:15] │ $ rimraf dist
[2024-01-10 14:23:17] │ $ nest build
[2024-01-10 14:23:17] │ /bin/sh: 1: nest: not found
[2024-01-10 14:23:17] │ error Command failed with exit code 127.
[2024-01-10 14:23:17] │ info Visit https://yarnpkg.com/en/docs/cli/run for documentation about this command.
[2024-01-10 14:23:17] │ building: exit status 127
[2024-01-10 14:23:17] │ ERROR: failed to build: exit status 1

What have been changed / what should we change? (Force deployment with clean caches have not worked)

It’s really puzzling since we have a quite identical “test” environment where everything works fine, even after this error occurred, with forced rebuild & clean caches as well.

I have read somewhere that the “@nestjs/cli” would not work as “devDependency” but as a regular “dependency” (and this sound as a plausible reason), but why have not occurred then this error way before?

Any hint / help is really appreciated :) Gabor

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Gabor Rendes • January 11, 2024

Accepted Answer

For anyone interested: it really sees that somehow DO build/deployment started working differently out of the blue.

As far as we concluded, earlier our app was able to use/access the devDependencies and since this was no more the case, we had to make some dependency/configuration/command changes and were able to make it work.

An useful article how to access devDependencies during the build : https://docs.digitalocean.com/products/app-platform/reference/buildpacks/nodejs/#specifying-devdependencies

Mikhail Yaroshevskiy • April 20, 2024

Thanks for sharing your solution, @gaborrendes! In my case I found the cause of error suddenly appearing was adding the NODE_ENV environmental variable with value production. Without this, the development dependencies are installed just fine and the nest build command runs.