Building the Project

Before deploying the application to your server, you need to build the NestJS project for production. This compiles your TypeScript code into plain JavaScript in the dist/ folder.

Set up the build script

Make sure your package.json includes the following scripts. These should already be present if you created your NestJS application with the @nestjs/cli.

{
  ...
  "scripts": {
    ...
    "build": "nest build",
    "start:prod": "node dist/main.js",
    ...
  },
  ...
}

🔎 Info

The build script uses the Nest CLI to compile the project. The start:prod script is used to run the compiled code.

Build the project

Now you can run the build script to create the /dist directory.

npm run build

Verify the output

If everything went well with the build you should have the following folder structure:

/dist
  ├── main.js
  ├── app.module.js
  └── ...

Run the build locally

If you want to make sure, the built version runs without any errors, you can already test it locally.

NODE_ENV=production node dist/main.js