Error trying to deploy Node.js project to Google app engine

Question

I am trying to deploy my node.js project to my App Engine project. the command I use is gcloud preview app deploy app.yaml.

This is my app.yaml file:

runtime: nodejs
vm: true
skip_files:
  - ^(.*/)?.*/node_modules/.*$

and this is the error I get: ERROR: (gcloud.preview.app.deploy) We were unable to detect the runtime to use for this application. Please specify the [runtime] field in your application yaml file or check that your application is configured correctly.

I'm pretty sure I have set up the project correctly, and have also gcloud init my gcloud CLI.

Any help'd be appreciated!

EDIT:

$ gcloud --version
Google Cloud SDK 99.0.0

bq 2.0.18
bq-nix 2.0.18
core 2016.02.26
core-nix 2016.02.05
gcloud 
gsutil 4.17
gsutil-nix 4.15

$ gcloud components list

Your current Cloud SDK version is: 99.0.0
The latest available version is: 99.0.0

┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│                                    Components                                   │
├───────────────┬─────────────────────────────────┬───────────────────┬───────────┤
│     Status    │               Name              │         ID        │    Size   │
├───────────────┼─────────────────────────────────┼───────────────────┼───────────┤
│ Not Installed │ Cloud Datastore Emulator        │ gcd-emulator      │  38.1 MiB │
│ Not Installed │ Cloud Pub/Sub Emulator          │ pubsub-emulator   │  10.1 MiB │
│ Not Installed │ gcloud Alpha Commands           │ alpha             │   < 1 MiB │
│ Not Installed │ gcloud Beta Commands            │ beta              │   < 1 MiB │
│ Not Installed │ gcloud app Java Extensions      │ app-engine-java   │ 101.4 MiB │
│ Not Installed │ gcloud app Python Extensions    │ app-engine-python │   7.2 MiB │
│ Not Installed │ kubectl                         │ kubectl           │   5.2 MiB │
│ Installed     │ BigQuery Command Line Tool      │ bq                │   < 1 MiB │
│ Installed     │ Cloud SDK Core Libraries        │ core              │   3.9 MiB │
│ Installed     │ Cloud Storage Command Line Tool │ gsutil            │   2.6 MiB │
│ Installed     │ Default set of gcloud commands  │ gcloud            │           │
└───────────────┴─────────────────────────────────┴───────────────────┴───────────┘

Answer 1

Try adding --verbosity=debug to your "gcloud preview app deploy" command to see what's going on. Most likely, there's something else about your application that gcloud doesn't recognize, like a missing or invalid package.json. This is being badly reported as an unrecognized runtime.

To be recognized as a node.js app, you must either have a server.js file or have a package.json file with a "scripts" section specifying a "start" command.