[Optimization?] Don't make 6x write applification

[sroussey]

Goals

1. Smaller files to deploy to servers

Non-Goals

Background

Since there is still no answer to this discussion for four years, I used this kind of solution:

module.exports = {
  webpack: (config, { buildId, dev, isServer, defaultLoaders, webpack }) => {
    config.plugins.push(
      new CopyPlugin({
        patterns: ['data/generated/*', 'data/quotes/**'],
      })
    );
    // Important: return the modified config
    return config;
  },
};

And in code that needs to load a json file found there:

if (existsSync(path.join(process.cwd(), 'data'))) {
  data = path.join(process.cwd(), 'data');
} else {
  data = path.join(process.cwd(), '.next/server/chunks/data');
}
const data = readFileSync(data, 'quotes', 'IBM.json')

When I put a dummy file a folder and search for its contents, I find six (6) copies. This is 200MB of json, so 200*6 tries to get deployed. Haha.

❯ grep -r "zbnbnbnbnbnbnbnbnbnbnbnbnbnbnbnbnbnbz" .next
Binary file .next/cache/webpack/client-production/0.pack matches
Binary file .next/cache/webpack/edge-server-production/0.pack matches
Binary file .next/cache/webpack/server-production/0.pack matches
.next/server/chunks/data/generated-gz/aghghghghghghghghghghga:zbnbnbnbnbnbnbnbnbnbnbnbnbnbnbnbnbnbz
.next/server/data/generated-gz/aghghghghghghghghghghga:zbnbnbnbnbnbnbnbnbnbnbnbnbnbnbnbnbnbz
.next/data/generated-gz/aghghghghghghghghghghga:zbnbnbnbnbnbnbnbnbnbnbnbnbnbnbnbnbnbz

Proposal

Allow setting a folder to get copied over. Then people could use SQLITE which is currently not compatible with NEXTJS.

The only real way to do things right now that does not have the 6x amplification: put your files (like your sqlite file or json files) in the public directory. Yikes. Definitely turn off directory listings. And put files in a long confusing directory name. So long as no one can figure that out... Yikes