AWS Pipeline; NextJS; Not all artifacts are uploaded on EC2 instance; GitHub -> CodeBuild -> CodeDeploy

I am using NextJS to build a frontend application.

My code base is stored on GitHub. I use codepipeline to create a pipeline and deploy it on an EC2 instance with Ubuntu on it.

The issue: After my pipeline triggers it builds successfully, deploys successfully, but I can see that not all files from the build artifacts are being uploaded.

The folder that does not get uploaded even though I can see it being generated during the Code Build step is the build folder. Therefore I cannot run my server because I do not have build files deployed.

My buildspec.yml file:

version: 0.2

phases:

  install:
    runtime-versions:
      nodejs: 20
    commands:
      - echo "📦 Installing packages..."
      - npm install
      - echo "✅ Packages installed successfully; Current repository:"
      - ls -al

  build:
    commands:
      - echo "🚧 Starting building packages..."
      - npm run build

  post_build:
    commands:
      - echo "✅ Built successfully"
      - echo `date`
      - echo `Repository after build:`
      - ls -al

artifacts:
  files:
    - '**/*'
  discard-paths: no

My appspec.yml:

version: 0.0
os: linux

files:
  - source: /
    destination: /home/ubuntu/example

file_exists_behavior: OVERWRITE

hooks:
  ApplicationStart:
    - location: deploy/application_start.sh
      timeout: 300
      runas: root

My next.config.js:

/** @type {import('next').NextConfig} */
const nextConfig = {
  distDir: 'build'
};

module.exports = nextConfig;

My application_start.sh:

#!/bin/bash

cd /home/ubuntu/example

pm2 stop example_server
pm2 delete example_server
pm2 start npm --name "example_server" -- start

So the issue was in the CodeDeploy configuration. The artifacts were pointed to the "SourceArtifacts" and not to "BuildArtifacts" therefore the build folder did not get to the ec2 server.