Laravel Nova on Laravel Cloud

After moving an existing site to Laravel Cloud I immediately ran into an issue when trying to access Nova:

Illuminate\Foundation\MixManifestNotFoundException: Mix manifest not found at: /var/www/html/public/vendor/nova/mix-manifest.json

I have seen this issue before - I know I needed to publish Nova’s assets on deployment and I forgot to bring it over. So I added the publish command to Deploy commands on Laravel Cloud but the issue persisted.

It turns out on Laravel Cloud you need to add it to your Build commands instead, so that the assets are published during the build process.

composer install --no-dev
php artisan nova:publish

Obvious in hindsight, but I was confused for a while and couldn’t find anything online about it so I thought I’d share my solution.