Provide unminified production distribution

[jochenberger]

It would be nice if there was an unminified react-production.js in the release distributions. For example, this is useful for web application frameworks that do their own minification during runtime.

[iamdustan]

Running your project with NODE_ENV=production should achieve your desired effect.

[jochenberger]

I'm not talking about a node project. ;-) I use the dist/react.js file as an AMD module in a Java webapp.

[gaearon]

I think @iamdustan doesn't mean Node, he means using envifying (with something like loose-envify or webpack's DefinePlugin). After you envify the development build, it's going to replace process.env.NODE_ENV checks inside React with false, and then UglifyJS will eliminate these as dead branches. That's how React works when used from NPM, for example.

[zpao]

@gaearon yea, but that still means integrating node into your workflow. I think the ask is more about separating the minification part from the prod/dev split. And honesty I've thought about doing this for a while, making it clearer that react.min.js is not simply react.js minified (which is a different pattern than a lot of libs).

react.dev.js
react.dev.min.js
react.prod.js
react.prod.min.js

But apart from making it clearer for people who are inadvertently using the dev build in prod, I'm not sure what the real wins are. Minifiying an already minified lib isn't ideal but it should be harmless.

@jochenberger could you explain why this would be helpful?

[jochenberger]

@zpao Separating minification from the split is exactly my point. I use React in a Java web application framework. Users of the framework can enable or disable minification and toggle between development and production mode. Those settings are orthogonal (though the default settings are dev=>no minification, prod=> minification)
If a user chooses to disable minification in production, I'd like to be able to serve an unminified production version.

[jochenberger]

See also #7242

[gaearon]

We've actually gone into the opposite direction, and now minify even the CommonJS version ourselves in production mode. Doing this lets us apply optimizations that wouldn't otherwise be easy, consistently regardless of the bundler on the consuming side.

We don't expect people to need to debug React code itself so we don't plan to provide an unminified production mode. But if you feel strongly about it, you can build React from source and disable minification.