Webpack publicPath configured incorrectly for production builds?

[pascalw]

I'm new to Webpack so I could be wrong but; I'm including font-awesome in my project and noticed that in production builds the icons would not work, because it tried to load the icon files from /dist/...ttf.

Looking at the webpack.config.production.js I noticed this snippet which I think is incorrect:

config.output.publicPath = '/dist/';

Setting that to ../dist/ fixes my problem with font-awesome. Looking at the Webpack docs I think this indeed should be ../dist/ because we're not running a server in production builds.

Do you want me to send a PR for that?

[chentsulin]

This is a non-issue, and just about directory structure preference. I prefer to put all static resources into a dist directory instead of everywhere. So, personally I will copy font files into dist directory, too.

Notice that all js and css files will bundle into dist via webpack in this boilerplate, if you want to change publicPath, you should be careful and correctly handle path and directory change.

Another thing worth to mention here is that ../dist/ have no different with ./.

[pascalw]

I think I may have not been clear enough.

The problem is that config.output.publicPath for production builds is configured to point to /dist/ (notice the leading slash). However this doesn't work because in production builds assets are served from the filesystem, not a webserver.

[pascalw]

@jhen0409 yes exactly and that's why config.output.publicPath = '/dist/' doesn't work for production builds, as production builds run in the context of a file system meaning /dist/ would refer to the root of the filesystem.

[L-A]

Just chiming in to say that this should probably count as an issue – everyone using assets will bump into this and need to change the path, even if everything is in dist.

Since packaged assets are not requested from a server, files that are compiled to dist will currently be requested from file:///dist/assetname, because it's configured as an absolute path.

As @pascalw is saying, with ../dist/ in config.output.publicPath, it would behave as expected.

[pascalw]

@chentsulin sent a PR that fixes this.

[L-A]

@pascalw Cheers! I was about to do the same thing. We've already put more effort discussing it than the correction requires :)

[chentsulin]

My bad. Thanks @pascalw !