Serve assets from `public/` instead of `.`

[tal]

By serving assets from the root directory you cannot have routes that have names the same as the folders built in such as src or any other you add to the app.

If we put index.html and all other static assets within a public folder this would only expose the assets that are needed.

[tal]

A little sad that issue 503 isn't a crashing bug 😞

[gaearon]

By serving assets from the root directory

Are we serving assets from root directory? If we are, we should disable that. We never intended this to be the case.

[tal]

eg hitting http://localhost:3000/src/ it will show the contents of the folder and any file within is shown.

[gaearon]

Um, this certainly was not the intention.
Would you like to send a PR to disable this?
I imagine some WDS option does it.

[tal]

Would you be opposed to the creation of a public directory to house all static assets? Honestly not 100% sure if there's another way to do this other than making an assets folder that would house all static assets and be accessible via localhost:3000/assets/my-asset.jpg

[gaearon]

What is the use case for doing that, as opposed to importing asset files from JS?

[davidascher]

If I understand this bug correctly, serving favicon like files for things like iOS etc requires something like it:

<link rel="apple-touch-icon" sizes="180x180" href="/static/icons/apple-touch-icon.png">
<link rel="icon" type="image/png" href="/static/icons/favicon-32x32.png" sizes="32x32">
<link rel="icon" type="image/png" href="/static/icons/favicon-16x16.png" sizes="16x16">
<link rel="manifest" href="/static/icons/manifest.json">
<link rel="mask-icon" href="/static/icons/safari-pinned-tab.svg" color="#0f7852">
<meta name="msapplication-config" content="/static/icons/browserconfig.xml">

I currently have a static dir in my root, and then a build task that moves the directories in that directory in the build tree after npm build. Don't know how else to serve those assets both in dev and prod.

[gaearon]

@davidascher I think that use case will be addressed by #226 and #413.

[tal]

Agreed, those PRs seem to be sufficient.

[tal]

Looking now i dont think #226 is sufficient. I'd propose hoisting index.html into src and having the other static files included via webpack in some way.

@davidascher I stated it in #226 but having a static folder I think would be a mistake because it provides 2 places for assets to go without a clear reason for them to be in any particular location. All of the assets in your example do not require a specific name so could go though transformations to gain cdn busting abilities and a unified pipeline.

I guess this issue is really asking for a way to have webpack parse and replace static files within the index.html? as well as disable webpack dev server's serving of assets that aren't linked to properly.