Notes on an error in building a meanjs project for production

README.markdown

Building production on a mean.js stack application

By mean.js I mean specifically an application based on the meanjs framework hosted here.

For reference, the following posts helped me identify and fix my problem.

• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/24516497/how-to-deploy-mean-js-node-js-application-to-production-environment
• https://blog.dylants.com/2014/11/19/bundling-production-assets-for-mean-js/

It works mostly like how you would expect. From a vanilla working development environment, the following should work:

grunt build
NODE_ENV=production grunt build

And then you can run your app in production mode via

NODE_ENV=production grunt

The following should also work:

NODE_ENV=production node server.js

However, if you added some external libraries during development, the above may not work. For example, if you added some libraries to your config/env/all.js file, you may need to add the to your config/env/prod.js file (despite this being called "all.js"). Here's a concrete example (config/env/all.js):

module.exports = {                                                                   
    app: {                                                                           
      ...
    },
    ...
    assets: {                                                                        
        lib: {                                                                       
            css: [
              ...
            ],
            js: [
                'public/lib/angular/angular.js',
                'public/lib/angular-resource/angular-resource.js',
                'public/lib/angular-ui-router/release/angular-ui-router.js',         
                'public/lib/angular-ui-utils/ui-utils.js',                           
                'public/lib/angular-bootstrap/ui-bootstrap-tpls.js',                 
                'public/lib/ng-file-upload/ng-file-upload-shim.min.js', //added library              
                'public/lib/ng-file-upload/ng-file-upload.min.js', //added library
            ]                                                                        
        },

Be sure to add these to config/env/prod.js as well:

module.exports = {                                                                   
    ...
    assets: {                                                                                                       
        lib: {                                                                           
            css: [                                                                   
              ...
            ],                                                                       
            js: [                                                                    
                'public/lib/angular/angular.min.js',                                 
                'public/lib/angular-resource/angular-resource.js',                   
                'public/lib/angular-ui-router/release/angular-ui-router.min.js',     
                'public/lib/angular-ui-utils/ui-utils.min.js',                       
                'public/lib/angular-bootstrap/ui-bootstrap-tpls.js',                 
                'public/lib/ng-file-upload/ng-file-upload-shim.min.js', // add here too
                'public/lib/ng-file-upload/ng-file-upload.min.js',  // add here too
            ]                                                                        
        },