Excluding Files

We now have CSS - which we're building with Tailwind - we have JavaScript, we're bringing in third-party JavaScript, and we're using modern JavaScript syntax. Our app has everything that a real app has! Sure, it's kind of small, but we're almost ready to deploy it.

Checking your Exposed Files

Before we do, let's do a quick audit on the assets that are inside AssetMapper. Find your terminal and run:

php bin/console debug:asset

This lists all of our asset paths, which includes our main asset path - assets/ - plus a few from bundles that have exposed their own directories. Below is a list of every file that will be exposed publicly.

We're running this command to see if there's anything in this list that we do not want to publicly expose. For example, this assets/styles/app.css file. This is really a source file: it's not meant for the user to download directly. We're using Tailwind to build that into app.tailwind.css, and that's what the user will download. It's not a huge deal that this is available publicly, but it's a good example of how we can hide "source" files that we don't want to expose.

Asset Mapper Config

Start by running

php bin/console config:dump framework asset_mapper

We're asking the system to give us example configuration for everything that can be configured under framework, asset_mapper. When we first installed AssetMapper, its recipe gave us a config/packages/asset_mapper.yaml file. Here, we have framework, asset_mapper, and a key called paths. When we run this command... sure enough, up here on top, it shows paths. Below that, we have some other interesting things.

The first is excluded_patterns. This is how we're going to hide certain files or paths - and we'll talk more about that in a minute. You can also control the public_prefix, which is where your files are output to in the public/ directory.

This extensions isn't super important... it's mostly just for the dev environment... and there are a few other things like your importmap_path, and even some attributes you can put on the <script> tag that's dumped by the importmap() function.

Excluding Files / Patterns

So there's some good stuff in here... but you won't need to worry about most of it, aside from excluded_patterns.

Copy that key, spin over to asset_mapper.yaml, and on the same level as paths, paste. We want to exclude assets/styles/app.css.

But this isn't quite correct. To prove it, run

php bin/console debug:asset

again. If you look up... assets/styles/app.css is still there! That's because excluded_patterns is meant to be a glob. In other words, change this to */assets/styles/app.css... and surround it by quotes.

This says that any "filesystem path" that ends with /assets/styles/app.css will be ignored. And when we try the command again...

php bin/console debug:asset

Awesome. This is what we want to see. Every file here will be dumped into the /public/assets directory. The fact that assets/styles/app.css is not here means that it will not be dumped into the public/ directory.

I think it's time to deploy our site! Let's get a deploy set up next on platform.sh.