Discussion about public and build folders

[toviszsolt]

Hi Guys and Girls!

I want to talk about public and build folders.
I'm a web developer for over 15 years, and I have made many commercial web based projects. Good frameworks are ready to use in the commercial segment.

In the commercial segment, there are many servers which NOT supporting Node applications. Developers shipping sites over FTP (YES! It's funny but, truth.) to these servers. If I get a job, usually the hosting and domain already exists, so I can't tell the customer: "Hey, there are no Node and Git support on your server!". In most cases, I need to work with provided hosting technologies.

My opinion is that, need a final static build directory for FTP cases. In most cases, this name is build, dist or _site. But we are all developers, so I guess to let developers configuring this parameter would be perfect.

CRA (create-react-app) out of the box with the public folder, which is handled by developers (similar to src). They used it to pass through the build process static files, like favicons, robots.txt, site verification, or just a downloadable pdf file. They copy these files to the build folder without and processing.

Now I tried this folder structure across some projects. It's comfortable for me because I can separate real sources (needs to be compiled) from static resources.

I hope my view can help in growing.