Echo on production

I'm having trouble with Laravel Echo (I think). I've built a vue chat app that works locally. I've even cloned it onto another machine and got it working fine. But when I get it onto production, it's not working. I'm not running npm on the server, I'm just doing a run npm prod before committing and pushing to the server. For some reason it just doesn't work though. The messages are getting through to pusher as I can see them in the debug console.

Here's some of the code: mounted() { console.log('mounted');

        Echo.private(`messages.${this.user.id}`)
            .listen('NewMessage', (e) => {
                console.log('in echo');
                this.hanleIncoming(e.message);
            });

        axios.get('/contacts')
            .then((response) => {
                this.contacts = response.data;
            });
    },
    methods: {
        startConversationWith(contact) {
            this.updateUnreadCount(contact, true);

            axios.get(`/conversation/${contact.id}`)
                .then((response) => {
                    this.messages = response.data;
                    this.selectedContact = contact;
                })
        },
        saveNewMessage(message) {
            console.log(message);
            this.messages.push(message);
        },
        hanleIncoming(message) {
            if (this.selectedContact && message.from == this.selectedContact.id) {
                console.log('inside if of handleincoming');
                this.saveNewMessage(message);
                return;
            }

            this.updateUnreadCount(message.from_contact, false);
        },

When local I get all the console.logs, but on prod I only get one and that's because saveMessage gets called on hitting enter from the message chat window. Do I need to install something on the server to get echo to work since I'm not doing npm install on the server. I don't think node is even installed. Any help would be appreciated!