I was facing this issue in staging and production where I was building my application and it bugged me for quite a while because in development I could load my assets just fine.

Eventually, I realized that I was not copying my public folder into my docker container in staging and production. In development the public folder was there and could be served, but, as soon as I was serving my nestjs application from the dist folder, no dice.

The solution for me was to add a copy command to my Dockerfile:

COPY --chown=node:node --from=build /usr/local/app/public ./dist/public

and it was served thanks to:

  app.useStaticAssets(join(__dirname, 'public'), {
    index: false,
    prefix: '/public/',
  });

The docker command has some extra stuff for my specific build flow but just COPY /path/to/app/public ./dist/public should work for you upon replacing path/to with the correct path to your application code.