Exclude assets in production build

Question

I have some assets (images, styles) which I only need during development (ng serve). These assets must not be included in the production build. In production these assets are provided by a CDN.

I need:

• ng serve should serve files contained in the folder ./assets-non-build

but:

• ng build should not inculde the folder ./assets-non-build in the final build

I have worked through 10 similar questions here on SO and 5 issues on github, they all deal with excluding files, but none solved my situation.

Answer 1

Inside your angular.json there is a configurations object projects.{project-name}.architect.build.configurations.

Set the assets inside the prod entry to []

"production": {
  //...
  "assets": []
}

This is untested though, but by judging from what I know from the configuration file, this should be possible.

This will make any build and serve with the production flag to exclude the assets. If you really want all the builds, no matter the environment, to build without assets, you move the assets array from projects.{project-name}.architect.build.options to the projects.{project-name}.architect.serve.options and set the one in build to an empty array.