What files of Laravel Elixir are necessary on production server?

Question

Intro: Gulp watches my css/js files till development mode on my local machine.

Then on production stage I upload all laravel project on production (live) server.

Problem: With all that gulp and elixir stuff installed laravel project becomes very heavy.

Question: What files of node_modules directory do I exactly need to load with project on production server to make Elixir works fine?

I mean including all.css and all.js files by

<link rel="stylesheet" href="{{ elixir('css/all.css') }}">

Maybe there is no need to load all of them?

Answer 1

You don't have to worry about including any files from the node_modules directory; you can think of those as dependencies similar to the vendor directory for your php project.

You'll just need to include the files in the public/* directory in order to have working views if you are using the default paths and configuration for compiling assets. You can see a good example of this in the Scripts section of the Elixir documentation.

The scripts method assumes all paths are relative to the resources/assets/js directory, and will place the resulting JavaScript in public/js/all.js by default:

elixir(function(mix) { mix.scripts([ 'jquery.js', 'app.js' ]); });

As a side note, I personally wouldn't recommend creating this sort of separation because the project seems heavy. If you have a very large project size, it most likely shouldn't be due to css and js. You can also consider using a cdn to lighten the production space if needed.

Answer 2

I've run into the same problem. My gulpfile.js has

mix.sass('app.scss');
mix.browserify('app.js');
mix.version(['css/app.css', 'js/app.js']);

This is my solutions:

• Option 1: If you have npm and gulp on server. On local machine, do npm shrinkwrap, then push package.json, gulpfile.js, npm-shrinkwrap.json, resources/assets/(js|sass). In server website root, do npm install and gulp --production
• Option 2: No need npm or gulp on server. Just do gulp --production on local and push public/build/* to server. If Elixir versioning is not used, push public/(js|css) instead. resources/assets(js|css) and all npm gulp stuff can be kept from server.

node_modules is not needed in either case.
I used option 2, much easier and worked fine for me.