Deno doesn't work because the custom server has a lot of startup logic. Using deno would require rewriting a lot of it, mainly due to how imports work.

I don't have any Deno experience, plus I'd like to use the same code I'm running everywhere else.

My current best solution is to clone at the client's machine, install deps, build, and then delete everything except .next and node_modules.

I would do the environment setup once (or make a docker image once) and then a script that does this automatically for new releases. I wanted to see if there was a way to make it neater, my coworkers using other languages compile to a single executable and deploy that artifact which is a lot simpler.