I was recently working on a Vue.js project and I am done with the "Beta-Version". I want to deploy my website to an online server and share it with the world. I used npm run build to generate the scripts in the dist folder, and now I want to upload the files to the server, but I doubt that all the files are necessary to be uploaded. I guess I should remove some files that don't effect the user experience.
The Question: What are the files that can be removed before deploying a Vue.js project?
Note: I'm not talking only about the dist folder, I'm taking about removable files and folders in the root project directory, that contains dist and package.json and node_modules.
The purpose of build process is to put any and all files and nothing else necessary for deployment into a folder, in this case, dist folder.
Oops. This was meant to be a comment.
You really shouldn’t delete any file in dist folder unless you know for sure you don’t need it.
If you do know that certain file doesn’t belong, it shouldn’t be there to begin with.
But unless you modified build portion to add something you don’t need, it most likely doesn’t contain any that shouldn’t be there.
Related
I ran this command to create a ReactJS app
npx create-react-app learningapp
This created several folders now, I dont know which of them are important. I mean I dont know their purpose.
Can anyone explain their purpose in short?
node_modules -- very important, as this will contain all the npm packages and their entire list of dependencies installed.
public -- very important, contains the static files served by your web server.
Index.html -- the index.html file where your react app will inject elements into. I believe this is the only "essential" file.
The other files in this folder will contain logos and manifests if you'd like your webpage to be able to be installed as a mobile app seamlessly. The manifest.json file holds the information about what the app icon and such will look like.
Favicon is the tiny logo you see in your tab title
robots.txt will have the instructions for bots visiting your website. Read about it here if you'd like (https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/bots/what-is-robots.txt/)
src -- very important, will contain your source code. If you want your app to do anything at all, it wouldn't be very wise to delete this folder. If you want to rename this to something else, you can, but you'd have to mess with the webpack configurations. So, not worth the little extra effort. However, you may alter the folder contents.
Unless you want performance monitoring and are writing tests for your app, you can safely delete the test file and the report webvitals stuff. You can make your test files somewhere else too, it doesn't matter if it's here. Just make sure you configure your testing library so that it looks for the correct files.
The rest of the files in this folder can be modified all you like, but try not to touch index.js unless you want to go mess with the webpack configs to change the entry point. Webpack looks for index.js as an entry point to build its dependency tree during compilation.
.gitignore -- this is the files/folders you can tell git to ignore when tracking your folder. A usual candidate for this file is the node_modules folder.
package.json/package.json -- very important, don't directly mess with these unless you know what you're doing. This contains the info about npm packages which your require to run your project properly. A situation where you will need to mess with package.json is when you want to add some custom npm scripts, which is often quite useful.
README.md -- just your readme file which is used to display info about the project on your github repo for example. You can delete it, but just put something on there containing basic info about the repo/ what it does.
is it dangerous to keep the folder node_modules on the prod server after building the app.js? Or should I delete the folder after building?. The node_modules folder is not public.
Welcome to StackOverflow, dfgdghjezfghfgdh!
Generally speaking, as the folder is not public, you don't need to worry about it existing in the file system. Depending on how your project is built you might even require it in your production environment as well.
Hope this helped.
If your build process uses webpack (or equivalent) to generate the distributable js, you dont need to keep node_modules at all.
To be clear, I am not asking if I need node_modules folder on live host server. That question & answer exists on Stack Overflow already. The consensus answer, in general is YES - I still need the node_modules directory during runtime.
I am also not asking about running npm init or npm install. I understand how that works.
I am specifically asking - do I still need the node_modules directory on the live/host server if I use webpack during my build process? Doesn't webpack bundle all the necessary JS, etc into folder? Can I delete the node_modules folder if use webpack? Or, will I still need that directory during runtime?
This is for a basic front end, client side web application only. This front end calls other API only for backend sevice. This front end web application is being hosted on Windows/IIS.
The site's published code includes static references like this:
<link rel="stylesheet" href="/css/app.css?id=f243e9c6546d420fec1f">
<script src="/js/app.js?id=bf7be8f179cc272c0190"></script>
Ignore the id= part, as I think that's part of the web framework for cache busting.
No, everything is in the bundle after you build. You can take the files defined as output (usually whatever is in the "dist" folder) and stick them on whatever static server you want without the need of the supporting node_modules.
During your web pack build process ,need the node modules folder , because when you import a file from the node_modules , web pack will try to fetch the file from the particular node_module folder recursively.
Once you successfully done with the build you will get a dist package folder with all the bundles for the deployment, it will not contain node_modules folders.
You can test it by using
npm run build
I am playing with the yoman trying to build a web site using the webapp generator.
If Managed to create a web site that works under grunt server, when I change a js file grunt notices the change change and does a live load and everything works as you would expect.
When I try a plan grunt, it attempts to run the dist task, it manages to include my html files, but skips any of the javascript or script files I created in the script and styles diretores. I assume its the case I have to tell grunt to includes these files
Files such as main.js seem to make it through, but there are no references to main.js in the Gruntfile, so I not sure which part of Gruntfile.js to change.
Doing a yo doctor reports
[Yeoman Doctor] Everything looks all right!
Q. How to do I tell grunt to include and user created files.
Q. I noticed that all my image files where renamed, fair enough how do I refer to a file that I known is going to be renamed in a javascript file
Q. Does anybody known a good web resource for yoman where these quesion might have already been answered?
Be careful on this glob pattern scripts/{,*}/*.js. This takes only the js files that are inside scripts or immediate child folders.
Make sure to change it to scripts/**/*.js to include all js files in all subfolders.
Also get an idea on tags build: css, build: js in your index.html, wiredep plugin used by Yeoman in gruntfile to understand what files will be injected into dist folder.
My question is partly technical and partly about deployment strategies and workflow. I built a project using Require JS. It includes a number of distinct js modules, and is built upon Kirby CMS. The directory structure of the project is something like this:
project
assets
styles
style.css
js
scripts
script1.js
script2.js
script3.js
vendor
app.js
images
fonts
content
...
kirby folders
....
The file app.js is called in the footer of my site's page like so:
<script data-main="/assets/js/app" src="/assets/js/vendor/require.js"></script>
It configures RequireJS by calling the requirejs.config() function and then calls the main script file that loads everything else using RequireJS's requirejs() function.
I've used RequireJS' s optimization tool to compile the project in such a way that the optimized files are all dumpted into a directory called dist (a name I just picked up from this tutorial). So in the end dist contains a replication of every directory and file under assets, only optimized, and the file app.js is a concatenated and optimized version of all the js modules that I have in the project. So far so good.
What I am unsure about, however, is how I'm the supposed to make use of this new secondary version of all the code. What for instance if I want to deploy a version of the site to the production server without all the source js files? Each time I deploy the site, I would need to go through my code and in every place that I referred to files under the assets directory, I would need to replace that with dist. I deploy using git and beanstalk. One way to do this would be to manage different branches for staging, production, and development, in which the production and perhaps staging branches have references to the files under dist, but this seems awkward.
So my question is given this kind of optimization set up, which if you look at the tutorial linked above is one way to do this, how then do you manage the switch to the optmized version of everything seemlessly, without having to go back into your code and change everything up? Is there some key part of the process that I'm missing here?
Each time I deploy the site, I would need to go through my code and in every place that I referred to files under the assets directory, I would need to replace that with dist.
I've looked at the tutorial you've linked to and do not see how it is true for the tutorial. The tutorial does not use absolute paths, so should be deployable from dist just as well as from the directory that contains the pre-optimization sources. If you cannot do this for your application, that's because you've done something different from the tutorial. Your script tag, for instance, shows absolute paths.
So the solution is to design your application to avoid absolute paths. This way, you won't have to change paths when you deploy from dist. I'm using this very method to deploy optimized and non-optimized versions of one of my apps.