Feature request: serveStatic (for-free passthroughCopy)

[TigersWay]

I have been using - quite a lot - the serveStatic feature of browsersync.

Despite being "minimal", could this new server propose the same feature?
Of course it's still possible to use browsersync.

[zachleat]

Hmm, interesting idea!

https://browsersync.io/docs/options/#option-serveStatic

Has me thinking about the overlap between something like this and passthrough copy—specifically, we could expose passthrough copy directories as static dirs instead of requiring them to be copied to the output folder (during dev mode).

How else do you use this one?

[TigersWay]

That's exactly how I use it!
We sometimes have quite heavy static folder(s), it seems a little pointless to copy all the files again and again.

[epelc]

We would benefit from something like this too. Having to copy thousands of image files can be quite slow.

It'd be really nice if eleventy.addPassthroughCopy() had an option of not actually copying files during serve but only during build. ie just go check the source path for whatever wildcard is listed instead.

Having it support to existing api would be very helpful as older sites have a mix of directory layouts and do not have all your image/asset files in a nice top level folder.

[TigersWay]

Thank to @zachleat and his answer to #13, I simply tried the serve-static middleware for expressjs and it's working fine!

• It's then easy to swap from the [dev server & middleware] to [addPassthroughCopy] for production
• There's just one problem left, we can't - simply - filter the requested path/resources as expressjs is doing with use

[zachleat]

For-free passthrough copy was filed on core at 11ty/eleventy#2456 will be shipping with Eleventy 2.0.0-canary.12!

Closing this one as resolved—the dev server piece of this shipped with 1.0.0-canary.11.

Thank you!