Bundling Your Node.js Express App with esbuild

When setting up a backend node project, I have almost always defaulted to setting up a TypeScript to build the app using the outDir property in tsconfig.json.

// tsconfig.json
{
  "compilerOptions": {
    ...
    "outDir": "./built",
    ...
  }
}

This worked well for local development as the node_modules folder sits right there and running the built file is a simple node built/index.js.

This did not work so well when it came time to deploy the backend code to a server. In order to successfully run…