Webapp Resource files
Why?
This directory contains additional resources for at least the /index.html and /app page. Many of these were served directly from CDN's before. However, that introduces a dependency where CoCalc.com can't load unless all these random CDN's also work... and that is unacceptable for two reasons:
- If any of these CDN's go down, CoCalc.com would get mangled or not load. That's no good.
- If you use a private install of cocalc on a computer that doesn't have network access, it doesn't work at all ever. That's definitely not good.
How?
Run npm ci to install the modules in the node_modules directory, as usual. The run npm run build to update the dist/ subdirectory with all relevant data ready to be served via various webservers. The setup.py script (that npm run build uses) makes sure to include a version number in the path, because all files will be served with a long cache time.
IMPORTANT: we copy all the files from node_modules to dist, rather than just making symlinks, because (1) the symlinks don't get published to npm anyways, and (2) the node_modules folders would likely get hoisted away when we install elsewhere, thus breaking everything.
Notes
Other files in packages/assets might not be used any more. At some point we can clean them up.
We have to run a postinstall script to create the versioned symlinks, since -- to be cross platform -- npm itself doesn't support symlinks.