"Target class [nova] does not exist." trying to deploy to Heroku

[andrewheins]

We've got a Laravel 9 application using Nova 4.35.2 that we've got working locally, but we're running into issues getting it to load the Nova routes when we deploy it to Heroku.

We're consistently getting "Target class [nova] does not exist." when we try to load the Nova routes.

I'm inclined to think this is related to trying to load the 'nova' middleware group, as I found a SO answer that says "The "target class [class] does not exist" is the error message thrown when a middleware by alias is not found.", which tracks. I've tried commenting out that line in the config/nova.php file, and I started getting different errors.

Here's a full stack trace:

production.ERROR: Target class [nova] does not exist. {"exception":"[object] (Illuminate\\Contracts\\Container\\BindingResolutionException(code: 0): Target class [nova] does not exist. at /app/vendor/laravel/framework/src/Illuminate/Container/Container.php:891)
2024-10-09T22:52:01.918491+00:00 app[web.1]: [stacktrace]
2024-10-09T22:52:01.918568+00:00 app[web.1]: #0 /app/vendor/laravel/framework/src/Illuminate/Container/Container.php(770): Illuminate\\Container\\Container->build()
2024-10-09T22:52:01.918659+00:00 app[web.1]: #1 /app/vendor/laravel/framework/src/Illuminate/Foundation/Application.php(856): Illuminate\\Container\\Container->resolve()
2024-10-09T22:52:01.918728+00:00 app[web.1]: #2 /app/vendor/laravel/framework/src/Illuminate/Container/Container.php(706): Illuminate\\Foundation\\Application->resolve()
2024-10-09T22:52:01.918804+00:00 app[web.1]: #3 /app/vendor/laravel/framework/src/Illuminate/Foundation/Application.php(841): Illuminate\\Container\\Container->make()
2024-10-09T22:52:01.918883+00:00 app[web.1]: #4 /app/vendor/laravel/framework/src/Illuminate/Foundation/Http/Kernel.php(239): Illuminate\\Foundation\\Application->make()
2024-10-09T22:52:01.918978+00:00 app[web.1]: #5 /app/vendor/laravel/framework/src/Illuminate/Foundation/Http/Kernel.php(203): Illuminate\\Foundation\\Http\\Kernel->terminateMiddleware()
2024-10-09T22:52:01.919030+00:00 app[web.1]: #6 /app/public/index.php(58): Illuminate\\Foundation\\Http\\Kernel->terminate()
2024-10-09T22:52:01.919032+00:00 app[web.1]: #7 {main}

We've run the composer install, we've migrated the DB, and cleared all of our caches, but we can't seem to figure out how to step past this issue.

Any guidance y'all might be able to point me at to resolve this would be hugely appreciated.