I can't figure out how to start my server once it's deployed

Hi all - I’m VERY new to Netlify (and a relative newbie at most everything else). I’ll give a TL;DR at the top, then describe in more detail in the middle, and then post the relevant links at the end.

TL;DR I don’t know how to ‘start’ my server once it’s built and deployed.

I’m trying to play around with SkyOffice, an OSS Gather.town clone. There’s a client and a server, and when I link the repo and build it, it runs great, but it’s hardcoded to point at a demo server that’s running that a LOT of other people are connected to as well. I can build and run a local server, and it works great, but when I change the location in the code to point at a separate deployed server, it fails to connect.

In my head, what I think is happening is that only the client builds. If I open the site after I change the server location to be what I think is, it attempts to connect to a server forever.

I’m trying to figure out how to:

a.) Build and run the server
b.) Write a little script to do that automatically - would that be best as a function?

Anyways, I’m not hoping for someone to fix everything for me - mostly I’m just hoping somebody will tell me what general tack I should take and give me a keyword or two to start googling. I’ve had a dumb idea to split out the server and the client repos and build them separately on two separate sites - but that seems silly?

Anyways, thanks very much for any thoughts/advice/leads/pointers you can offer - appreciate it all!

Repo: GitHub - kevinshen56714/SkyOffice: Immersive virtual office built with Phaser, React, Redux, PeerJS, and Colyseus.
My current site: https://k20client.netlify.app/

Hi, @nathan.g.bowman. The short answer can be found in the following support guide:

To summarize that guide above:

  • You cannot run a server at Netlify.

There are exception to this rule above. For example, if the code in question can be coaxed to run on AWS Lambda you can deploy the server using Netlify Functions. However, I don’t know this framework at all so I don’t know if that is possible or not.

If not (which I expect is the case), you can deploy the front-end to Netlify and then deploy the server to another service like https://www.heroku.com/.

If there are other questions about this, please let us know.

aha! That’s exactly what I needed to know - brilliant, thanks! Was already looking at heroku, cheers