Folders missing after building in standalone mode

[Vrezerino]

Summary

How come after building an app in standalone mode the output is missing folders? After building I have to manually

1. copy /public into /.next/standalone/
2. move /.next/static into /.next/standalone/.next
3. most likely also move /.next/BUILD_ID into /.next/standalone/

Additional information

No response

Example

No response

[icyJoseph]

There's an explanation for this behaviour in the docs, https://nextjs.org/docs/app/api-reference/config/next-config-js/output:

Additionally, a minimal server.js file is also output which can be used instead of next start. This minimal server does not copy the public or .next/static folders by default as these should ideally be handled by a CDN instead, although these folders can be copied to the standalone/public and standalone/.next/static folders manually, after which server.js file will serve these automatically.

And this command is suggested:

cp -r public .next/standalone/ && cp -r .next/static .next/standalone/.next/

Which means, you could create a package.json, that does the build and copying in one go as well.

[Vrezerino]

Oh yeah I already do that and it seems like I read that part in the docs yesterday, what I'm getting at is why have this behavior in the first place and expect the user to use a CDN.

[icyJoseph]

Yeah, it is quite a common pattern, that after build, the static assets are copied/uploaded to a CDN, which can replicate them and what not, across edge locations, yada yada, you know the drill.

Whereas, your server tends to be a bit more centralised per region. There might even be a few servers running together to share loads, spinning up and down, etc... That's why standalone mode exists, to just get exactly what's needed for a server to run, so that it is easy to start them, and that they don't occupy too much disk space with their assets, yada yada