Deploy a Svelte / Sapper application

Svelte / Sapper deploy

I started to play with Svelte / Sapper as an alternative to Angular.

The development of a simple application is quick and intuitive, I had issues to deploy a small application easily in the cloud.

The solution I found is to create a Docker image of the application and deploy it using Jelastic.

Being the content quite static I exported the result of the original REST answers of the Java backend in JSON files.

Dockerfile

FROM node:14-alpine 
 
WORKDIR /usr/src/app 
# the entire project is copied 
COPY / ./ 
RUN npm install 
RUN npm run build 
 
CMD ["node", "__sapper__/build"] 
 
EXPOSE 3000 
 
ENV HOST=0.0.0.0 

In Jelastic:

I deployed the image behind a NGINX Load Balancer.

Issues

Configuration

The main issue for me was the configuration of different environments: development and 'production'.
In Angular and Java every environment has his own configuration file out of the box.

I didn't find this in Sapper. The solution was to use external plugins. Even changing the port of the server required searching a solution on GitHub (prefix with PORT 80 the starting instruction was the easiest).

Working with different environments and services (backend etc.) it's annoying to don't have a pre-defined solution.

TypeScript

I tried to convert my project in TypeScript, Svelte provides an 'easy migration'. I think the migration failed with Sapper.
I ended using only JavaScript. This is not a blocker for a small project, different story for a big enterprise solution with many developers.

Personal Opinion

I like Svelte a lot. The main project comes with some companion solution for SSR and static website generation that fill some missing features of Angular.
The compilation central idea is a true alternative to React/Vue/Angular. Unfortunately Svelte doesn't seem to receive a lot of interest in the enterprises.