Copy-webpack-plugin: Retain file timestamps after copy

[mcalmus]

• Operating System:
• Node Version:
• NPM Version:
• webpack Version:
• copy-webpack-plugin Version:

Feature Proposal

See: https://github.com/angular/angular-cli/issues/14003
It would be nice if files copied using the plugin could retain their original timestamps rather than getting the current date and time.

Feature Use Case

When a build is done it becomes very difficult to determine what has changed and when transferring files to another system the timestamp can not be relied upon for quick checks.

[alexander-akait]

Please clarify what do you mean

[mcalmus]

When files are copied using the plugin the standard OS file copy is used. The resulting file has a date and time of when the copy was performed. It would be nice if the original file's timestamp were retained.

For example:

Say I have a file:

dir foo.png
02/21/2019 08:50 53,306 foo.png

When it's copied using the plugin it ends up as:
07/26/2019 10:00 53,306 foo.png

It would be nice if the copied file would retain the original February timestamp.

[alexander-akait]

keeping original date/time is invalid because copied files was created/modified at 07/26/2019, i think it is unnecessary for this plugin, and very rare edge, you can create own plugin for this purpose

[adrianhuna]

I got around this problem by using rsync

rsync -a ~/path/to/project/src/assets/ ~/path/to/project/build/assets

[akx]

We're using files copied by this plugin to upload a static site using aws s3 sync, which looks at file sizes and timestamps.
Currently all files get reuploaded on every sync, which is annoying.

I'll take a stab at implementing this, shouldn't be too hard.

[setzamora]

Same case here with Azure Storage, it would be great if we can retain the timestamp of each file so it would prevent it from being re-uploaded. This would speed up most CI/CD pipelines.

[alexander-akait]

Feel free to send a PR

[akx]

Feel free to send a PR

I have an open branch about this, but I got sidetracked. Perhaps I'll get something complete done this week or the next!

[DYefimov]

Found another problem with this same root cause:
Chrome devtools workspaces 2.0 is not mapping to local resources correctly when files differ by timestamp.
As a result: webpack bundled code is editable from devtools, where static files are not.

Would be nice to have this option for development env.
IMHO this option should be true by default.

[thw0rted]

Just as a data point, this would help me.

I use the plugin to grab static assets from some libraries I'm using and put them in my dist directory during the build, then I use rsync or robocopy (depending on platform) to push the build directory to a staging server for testing. Right now, the sync program can't tell that the assets are the same every time, because the files in the build directory always have a newer timestamp than the ones that were last pushed to staging.

[alexander-akait]

Let's close in favor https://github.com/webpack-contrib/copy-webpack-plugin/issues/35, I think we will implement this in near future