How to deploy 'Hello World' app to production with parcel

thecommexokid

I'm new to node and parcel and I'm trying to figure out how to serve a basic web app with parcel on OpalStack.

Here's what I've done so far.

I created a new application of type 'Node.js' on the OpalStack dashboard.
I created a new domain and routed the above application to '/'.

I created a simple index.html file in /home/[username]/apps/[appname].

% cd /home/[username]/apps/[appname]

% export PATH=$PWD/node/bin:$PATH

% type node
node is /home/[username]/apps/[appname]/node/bin/node

% node --version
v16.16.0

% type npm
npm is /home/[username]/apps/[appname]/node/bin/npm

% npm --version
8.11.0

% npm install --save-dev parcel
…
added 177 packages, and audited 178 packages in 12s
…

% ./stop
Stopped.

% npx parcel build index.html
✨ Built in 557ms
dist/index.html    144 B    334ms

Visiting the root address of my domain in my browser at this point gives a 502 Bad Gateway error. How do I get the page served?

nick

Hi there,

Since you stopped the Node server, nothing is actively running on your assigned Nodejs port #, hence the 502 error. Assuming your index.html is referencing the appropriate javascript file, To test the app I think running parcel -p <nodejs_port> /path/to/index.html may be sufficient in that regard. But to keep it running, you should be specifying the port in a js file and edit the start script to use it. If you continue to have issues please open a support ticket so we can examine your setup.

Ref: https://en.parceljs.org/getting_started.html

thecommexokid

Ok, I think I understand better now.

parcel build just bundles the app, it doesn't actually serve it.

For now, I set up a separate app on OpalStack with type 'Nginx static symlink' pointing at the dist directory created by parcel, and routed that app to my domain instead. That seems to be working for now.

Eventually I'm going to need to actually figure out a genuine Node.js server for the app but that's tomorrow's problem.