I have an application which I have managed to convert to Angular Universal (at my clients request). I ran my application by using the command npm run serve:ssr
npm run serve:ssr
I followed answer by r3plica, and I had to do a slight modification and move the dist/server to the root dir and all went well.
If things do not work, always use node to point at server.js
node
This tells you the most basic things you have gotten wrong