I have a Vue CLI application that I'm currently working on that uses code splitting for JS and CSS, and builds almost 1,000 JS/CSS files on running npm run build.
I am hosting this application on Google Cloud Run, where I pay per request. While the cost is still not that significant, I was still looking to try and prevent the need for 500 requests for every page view. I had a thought, but I'm not sure it's possible...
What I was wondering was if I could have my webpack build generate the JS and CSS files into the dist folder, but reference those files in the index.html file with an external host, instead of assuming a relative path. For instance, the file would exist at dist/css/chunk-abc123.js but in index.html, it would be something like https://storage.google.../css/chunk-abc123.js.
That way, in my CI pipeline, I can upload those files from the dist directory into Google Cloud Storage, and serve them up statically from there.
Does anyone know if this is possible? If so, can you guide me in the right direction?
publicPath comes in rescue.
The base URL your application bundle will be deployed at (known as
baseUrl before Vue CLI 3.3). This is the equivalent of webpack's
output.publicPath, but Vue CLI also needs this value for other
purposes, so you should always use publicPath instead of modifying
webpack output.publicPath.
// vue.config.js
module.exports = {
...
publicPath: 'https://storage.google...'
...
}
Related
The Nuxt documentation (latest) states that for SPA you need to set ssr: false in nuxt.config.js. Also, every vue file in the pages folder is added to the router configuration, so you don't have to do this yourself. This is both correct and works perfectly, but there is something I really don't understand.
When I run npm run build (nuxt-ts build), it builds the production output of the project and puts in the dist folder (default). I was surprised to see that even though I configured it to be a SPA, it still generates HTML files for each vue file in the pages folder.
It happens with newly generated projects using npx nuxt-create-app as well.
What I'd expect is that it only generates one HTML file (which is index) when ssr is set to false and when I want a static app, I would use npm run generate or set target to 'static' to create HTML files per route.
Nuxt documentation also states this for the target property:
https://nuxtjs.org/docs/2.x/get-started/commands#target-server-default-value (builds output to dist)
https://nuxtjs.org/docs/2.x/get-started/commands#target-static (generates HTML per route)
All I have in my config is ssr set to false, so it should not generate static files (HTML) per page.
What am I missing here, or am I misunderstanding how this works?
Thanks in advance!
Remember that in a static setup, your visitors may arrive at your site via any of your page routes— not just index.html.
For example, they may access https://www.your-app.com/contact-us. If you do not have a contact-us.html file available, and you don’t have a server configured to handle this request (as is the case with universal mode), you’re gonna end up with a 404.
What happens in static mode is contact-us.html is served, which contains the minimum javascript necessary to hydrate your nuxt app, then SPA mode kicks in— giving you client-side navigation.
I'm am trying to understand the directives that produce the output /dist/vue[.min].js file(s). While looking in node_modules folder, I see /dist and /src folders. The /src folder contains index.js. If I were to follow the dependency tree all the way through, would that result in the dist file? If the compiler is present, or the rules, in the vue package. I would appreciate if someone could point this out (and also verify/debunk my understanding of how the output file is produced).
Your build tool is actually responsible for creating the vue.min.js file. In case if you are not using any build tool then you need to use the minified version of vue.js file from the Vuejs site.
Also the vue.js gets created using the mode value of process.env.NODE_ENV variable.
You can have more details of this from the Production Deployment docs from the Vuejs site.
The rest of the details regarding the dir structure given in the vue.config.js config file.
I have developed a vue application and did run npm run build
After that I uploaded the content in the dist file to my webpage but it returned a blank page.
Since I did this for testing I uploaded it to a folder in my public_html/mypage.com/vueapplication To get all the paths right I added a vue.config.js with this content:
// vue.config.js
module.exports = {
publicPath: '/vueapplication/'
}
The application now works but I wounder however:
how do I best publish/upload the application to my site? Just by simply dragging the content inte the right folder?
how can I best maintain my site? Do I need to build again and upload, overwriting my files when everytime I make an update on my site?
And what is the difference between build and deploy your application?
Drag and dropping your code should work. But as your app grows you may want to look into automating this. For instance if you use an S3 bucket you can use the aws cli to automate the upload.
Yes, you should overwrite your deploy folder(s). You need to also take care of deploying different binary files, that have the same name. An example is if you have a global css file (main.css for instance). The file will probably change content between deployments, but keep the same name. Browsers may cache the file so users that downloaded older versions of the file will not use the new one. There are different techniques to handle this, but if you use webpack, it uses cache busting techniques and you should be fine.
Build is the process of transforming source code into an artifact(s). Exactly what this means differs from language to language, platform to platform. In the vuejs world this usually means a couple of js files, a couple of css files and some assets.
Deploying means taking the output of a build and making it available to your users. Again this differs from project to project. In the vuejs world this usually means taking the artifacts from the build and uploading them to an http enabled web server.
Background:
Using VueJS, specifically in regards to PWA template https://github.com/vuejs-templates/pwa
There is a build step npm run build which bundles the project and transpiles any Vue into a distribution browser JS.
The files in /static/ are "static" and just copied into dist, but I am wondering if it's possible to template it at all, or read in some dynamic values.
Question:
Is it possible to have static files that servce under /static in the url, but also during build can accept dynamic values?
More context:
The problem is Vue compiles everything into the dist directory.
All non-static assets are cached and get a unique url each build, whereas static files (I know this is configurable, but you arguably want your non-static assets to have caching) have absolute paths.
Server Routing to map a file in /static/ to a cached dynamic file is outside of Vue. The question pertains to needing to host some "absolute pathed files" (static), but some files might have internally 1-2 urls that need to change in the files depending on what config is used, dev, prod, staging.. just as an example of the use case.
The solution I found was to use CopyWebpackPlugin which comes natively inside build/webpack.prod.conf.js
This is the plugin that copies files from static into dist/static.
You can use the process.env.NODE_ENV to allow you to copy specific files from static into dist.
I decided just to keep environment specific copies of the files with values changed, but you could easily add code to that file to parse and copy over whatever specific files you want.
I think most people put dynamic configuration values in a file under public/ then use javascript fetch to load those values in Vue components. Webpack will copy the files in public/ to the web root (dist/) and it will avoid compiling those config values into the minified javascript. If you put files in static/ and use import or require to load them into Vue components then webpack will resolve those during build time and compiling them into the minified Javascript - which is probably not what you want.
We're currently using vue as a script file without a build step. We want to start using webpack and vue-cli. We need to preserve the asp login pages and session handling (cookies) so we need the vue stuff and the asp stuff to share an origin.
The current plan is to ignore the vue dev server, to put src and dist inside the existing .net project folder, and to have iis serve the contents of dist. Is this the way to go? We will lose hot reloading.
If we do this, how and where do I configure the url fragment from the web root to the dist folder? Currently, vue expects dist to be the root of the domain.