I am unable to deploy a nodejs/ejs application on netlify

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4

Netlify does not have a website backend structure like nodejs. Nodejs is used for the build environment during the CI/CD workflow to build the site being deployed to Netlify.

A MERN stack would not be supported on Netlify. You would not be able to host the app.js solution on Netlify, but I do have a partial solution for you to create a static site from your example repository.

Partial Solution

Create a script to build your page using node and ejs at the time of the Netlify build.

/build.js

const fs = require("fs");
const path = require("path");
const ejs = require("ejs");

function ejs2html({ path, outPath, data, options }) {
  fs.readFile(path, "utf8", function(err, data) {
    if (err) {
      console.log(err);
      return false;
    }
    ejs.renderFile(path, data, options, (err, html) => {
      if (err) {
        console.log(err);
        return false;
      }
      fs.writeFile(outPath, html, function(err) {
        if (err) {
          console.log(err);
          return false;
        }
        return true;
      });
    });
  });
}

ejs2html({
  path: `${__dirname}/views/index.ejs`,
  outPath: `${__dirname}/public/index.html`
});

This script will build an index.html static page for your site into the public folder and you can then use it to deploy a static version of the ejs view for index.ejs.

The /netlify.toml could be used as:

[build]
  command = "node ./build.js"
  publish = "public"

Caveats

This is not a MERN stack site deployed to Netlify. It is a static generated site using ejs.

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