gatsby-plugin-asset-path

Move all of your JS and CSS build files, as well as the static folder into a subdirectory of your choice.

Our use case

Gatsby by default will generate all of the assets and put them directly at the root level:

public
│   index.html
│   component1.js
|   component1.js.map
|   component1.css
|   component2.js
|   compoennt2.js.map
|   component3.css
└───path1
│   │   index.html
│   │   other1.html
│───path2
│   │   index.html
│   │   other2.html
|___static
|   |   data.json
|   |   image.jpg

However here at MadeComfy, we host our site on AWS Cloudfront/S3. One issue that we faced was that somehow, two different builds would have some JS/CSS files with the same file names even though their content are different.

That means during deployment on S3 and object invalidation on Cloudfront, someone that is currently browsing the site, would see the experience broken whilst moving onto other pages as the loaded JS would still have asset references of the previous build.

Hence our need to make sure that each build is kept intact on Cloudfront, except the HTML that are loaded on the browser at each hard reload. That way we make sure that our site has no down time at any point of time. We've configured our caching configs this way.

Using this plugin, our file struture is now as followed:

public
│   index.html
|___assets
|   |___1534761288
│   |   |   component1.js
│   |   |   component1.js.map
│   |   |   component1.css
│   |   |   component2.js
│   |   |   compoennt2.js.map
│   |   |   component3.css
│   |   |___static
│   |   |   |   data.json
│   |   |   |   image.jpg
└───path1
│   │   index.html
│   │   other1.html
│───path2
│   │   index.html
│   │   other2.html

Our new assets folder would contain assets of every build once on S3.

Install

npm install --save-dev gatsby-plugin-asset-path

yarn install -D gatsby-plugin-asset-path

How to use

// Your gatsby-config.js
{
    pathPrefix: "custom_asset_folder",
    plugins: [
        {
            resolve: "gatsby-plugin-asset-path"
        }
    ]
}

In our use case above, we have pathPrefix set as followed:

{
    pathPrefix: `/assets/${Date.now().toString()}`
}

Options

removeMapFiles

Default: false

Stops Webpack from generating the .js.map files

// Your gatsby-config.js
{
    plugins: [
        {
            resolve: "gatsby-plugin-asset-path",
            options: {
                removeMapFiles: true
            }
        }
    ]
}

Downside

Using pathPrefix is not ideal as it is really used by Gatsby to generate the sites in the case it will be hosted in a subfolder. Using this plugin breaks that situation as it is assumed the site will be served from the domain root.