Rails public/vite folder contains source files after bin/vite build

[fvsch]

Hi there!

I hesitated creating an issue because I’m not sure if that's expected behavior.

In a Rails app with Vite Ruby, running bin/vite build adds a bunch of files to public/vite, including:

1. manifest.json and an empty manifest-assets.json
2. an assets folder with compiled CSS/JS/images and source maps
3. and a bunch of source files including ERB and TypeScript files

That third category seems both unnecessary and a risk of data leak?

Those source files are also not part of the files listed in the terminal (by Vite or Rollup, not sure) upon a successful build, so I’m wondering if Vite Ruby is copying them over (and why!).

Setting build.sourcemap to false in vite.config.ts does not change anything for these files (but it does prevent emitting .map files).

Am I missing something?

[ElMassimo]

Hi Florens!

Haven't seen this before, so it's likely related to the app's configuration or dir structure.

If I had to guess based on the dir names, it looks like the sourceCodeDir is somehow ending up in Vite's output.

Vite will copy anything that is inside its public dir, which is one of the possible causes.

Vite Ruby will also process any additionalEntrypoints. You might want to check that you don't have an assets dir inside sourceCodeDir that contains code instead of images/stylesheets, or configure it to exclude that dir.

I'd recommend checking both your Vite Ruby and Vite config, and try using the default configuration (if you have customized it).

[fvsch]

Hmm I think the issue is that we have a structure like:

app/
  assets/
    …stuff for sprockets…
  frontends/
    entrypoints/…
    some-frontend/…
    public/…
config/
  vite.json
public/
vite.config.ts

And we configured the sourceCodeDir to be app/frontends, because setting it to e.g. app would make Vite Ruby or Vite (not sure) try to compile a bunch of SCSS code from app/frontends/stylesheets.

Apparently you should not have any folder named "assets" OR "public" at the root of your sourceCodeDir. ^^

The simple solution might be to rename app/frontends/public to something else like app/frontends/publicpages. I tried to avoid that because of the Git and organisational noise of moving a lot of source files, but it would fix the issue.

[ElMassimo]

Makes sense. You can configure publicDir in Vite to be something else, like static:

// vite.config.ts
export default defineConfig({
  publicDir: 'static',
})

That way you don't need to move files.

[fvsch]

Thanks!

Turns out you can set it to publicDir: false to disable the feature completely, and that works pretty well for us.