How to deploy a Vue.js application on Node.js server

Question

I have a dist folder containing CSS, fonts, JS folder and an index.html file minimized for Vue.js, ready to deploy and use. I want to use Node.js to run this application. How can I set this up to just run npm run server and have it deployed on a specific port requested? Not sure how to structure this or if I need to build it in a specific way to run this Vue app. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

Since Vue is only a frontend library, the easiest way to host it and do things like serve up assets is to create a simple Express friendly script that you can use to start a mini-web server. Read up quickly on Express if you haven’t already. After that, add express:

npm install express --save

Now add a server.js file to your project’s root directory :

// server.js
var express = require('express');
var path = require('path');
var serveStatic = require('serve-static');
app = express();
app.use(serveStatic(__dirname + "/dist"));
var port = process.env.PORT || 5000;
var hostname = '127.0.0.1';

app.listen(port, hostname, () => {
   console.log(`Server running at http://${hostname}:${port}/`);
 });

after that you could run :

 node server

and your project will be served at the given host and port

Assuming that you have already the dist directory, if you don't have it run :

npm run build

in order to generate it