Fully decouple next build from component

[danielcondemarin]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

Currently the next component takes on the responsibility of building the next app. Whilst this is "nice", it makes build issues harder to debug, reduces flexibility of different build workflows users have (especially in CI) and adds overhead to the component development for little value.

Describe the solution you'd like

Fully decouple next build from the component deployment. To deploy users can do:

next build && serverless

If you have a custom build directory:

component: serverless-next.js
inputs:
  buildDir: /path/to/.next

To keep the zero config. nature of the component, default value of buildDir will be ./.next. buildDir is the full path to the your distDir configured in next.config.js.

The public and static are expected to be siblings of buildDir.

Additional context

Solves issues #157, #149, #210

[jlaramie]

I've been thinking about this solution and while I like it it does remove the "0 configuration need" support. Maybe something like inputs.buildNext: false would skip the next build step but still do the other build steps like creating the manifests and lambda configuration.

[danielcondemarin]

@jlaramie I’ve seen so many opened issues out of next build that are distracting me from other things I could be working on in this project. This is what’s made me consider dropping building the app within the next component

[cameron-martin]

Regarding the build input, the README says:

When true builds and deploys app, when false assume the app has been built and uses the .next .serverless_nextjs directories in nextConfigDir to deploy.

The .next directory is created when running next build. However, how do I generate the .serverless_nextjs folder?

[cameron-martin]

It seems that I should be able to invoke the build method of the component using serverless build, according to the components documentation:

  /*
   * Anything (Optional)
   * - If you want to ship your Component w/ extra functionality, put it in a method.
   * - You can run this function by running "$ serverless anything"
   */

  async anything(inputs = {}) {
    return {}
  }

However, this gives the error:

Error: "component" input is required to run custom methods

[cameron-martin]

Right, it just requires a component cli flag, as explained here.