# Deployment
Deployment should be a one-step process at the most if you are not using CD, and zero-step if you are. We have three targets to our application; building all of them manually and deploying on your server and app stores is time consuming to do manually and error-prone.
TIP
Write a script for building and another for deploying your application, which can be easily called by a CD tool.
Ideally the building and deployment will be handled by your CI/CD tool. We talk about deployment on the backend section as well.
# Setup
Uglifying makes your code more difficult to alter, smaller and sometimes even faster. The terser plugin is already part of the build system.
There are a number of things to configure before your first build for native environments, such as the app name, launch screen and icons. Nativescript provides documentation to do all of this.
# Building
# Web build
We need to build the application. Remember to set your .env.local and .env.production.* files with the correct data for your production environment.
$ yarn version --patch # you can use this command to bump version
$ yarn build:web # build it
The result will be in the dist dir. Deployment varies wildly according to your hosting and server, but you essentially need to copy the dist dir to the public directory of your webserver. There's a guide at the vue-cli docs about deployment in several platforms.
# Remote native builds with CI
There is a [https://github.com/NativeScript/nativescript-remote-builds](plugin for remote builds) that is compatible with https://circleci.com and enables cloud building.
TODO
https://github.com/NativeScript/nativescript-remote-builds/blob/master/docs/CIRCLECI.md
# Local native Android build
If you prefer to generate the Android release locally or on your build server, you also can. To generate the APK:
yarn run build:android
There is extensive documentation on how to publish your Android app with NativeScript. The command above will build the APK, but to distribute the app you'll also have to sign it:
tns build android --release --key-store-path <path-to-your-keystore> --key-store-password <your-key-store-password> --key-store-alias <your-alias-name> --key-store-alias-password <your-alias-password>
Google Play Store has an API to upload and release APKs, which allows you to deploy new versions from your deploy script, without human intervertion. Check the libraries and sample code to get started.
# Local iOS
Remember that you can only build for iOS on an Apple computer.
yarn run build:ios
TODO https://docs.nativescript.org/tooling/publishing/publishing-ios-apps
# OpenGraph tags and SPA
Our SPA client is completely standalone, and does not require a dynamic server. It can be served from any static HTTP server.
One disadvantage of this is that your meta tags on <head> are not dynamic either. This means that previews of your page from OpenGraph or similar tags are static -- most clients parse OpenGraph tags from the HTML, without running Javascript. There are a couple ways to handle this.
One is to use the prerender SPA plugin. This works well if you have a static content, but does not scale to hundres of routes or dynamic content.
For completely dynamic content, SSR is required. There's a SSR guide from Vue. This is a backend problem, so we'll talk about it on the backend.