What's the best way to deploy with your own server?

[SpencerKaiser]

I have a node.js server (which is primarily just responsible for authentication via passport. Running locally I use next build and I build my own app, which is in typescript, and everything works perfectly.

I'm trying to deploy to IBM Cloud and no matter what I've tried, deploying the app has been a massive pain for me. Using cf push locally pushes all files (including .next) and tries to start the app but I always get the following error:
Error: Could not find a valid build in the '/home/vcap/app/next' directory! Try building your app with 'next build' before starting the server.

The only workaround I could find was to hackily move all my dev-dependencies to dependencies and then add next build to my start script. That was working (albeit incredibly janky) but as of yesterday, I'm now getting a different error:
Error: /home/vcap/app/src/components/layout.tsx: transform-react-jsx: pragma has been set but pragmaFrag has not been set

What is the right way to build my app and deploy? Was that first error being caused by something being different like the node version or the target (i.e., macOS to Linux)?

Thank you for the help!