I've got a Java web application that builds with Maven. My project uses RequireJS. I use a maven plugin at build time to compress the JS artifacts (https://github.com/bringking/requirejs-maven-plugin). The plugin calls out to NodeJS (with the r.js compressor) to do the actual work.
Local builds work wonderfully.
On Heroku, however, NodeJS is not available using the Heroku Java buildpack (the default for Java/Maven applications).
For now, I run the requireJS maven plugin locally using an active Maven profile that isn't present on the Heroku server. This prevents the RequireJS plugin from running on the Heroku server. This is less than ideal because it requires me to run the plugin locally, then check in the resulting build artifact. It's far better to generate the compressed JS file at build time in the Heroku system.
I'm looking for a good solution. Thanks in advance.
The best solution is to use Heroku Multi Buildpack with the Node.js and Java buildpacks. This is described in an article using Grunt with Java and Maven but the same principles apply for Require.js.