Html-webpack-plugin: Why default behavior of generating asset path is not started with root path?

Created on 23 Jan 2017 · 3Comments · Source: jantimon/html-webpack-plugin

I just had an issue with pathnames with multiple slashes(/.../).

With default behavior, it generates following scripts:
<script type="text/javascript" src="bundle.js"></script>

In SPA, If we navigate to URL like http://somehost/path1/path2, it try to load assets from http://somehost/path1/bundle.js, not http://somehost/bundle.js so it failed to initialize the application.

I found that we can override the path via setting publicPath to '/' so that every assets can be loaded from root path, but the default publicPath value was ''.

Is there any reason that default behavior is not generated with '/'?

Source

rokoroku

Most helpful comment

Default publicPath goes from your webpack config output.publicPath, which maybe set or maybe not. If you ask why webpack doesn't have output.publicPath set to / by default then it would be better to ask that question in webpack's repo.

If you ask why html-webpack-plugin doesn't have it set to / by default when publicPath is missing, then it's simple (I assume why it's so here): because having it as output.publicPath is a good default. After all, you don't want to have troubles with someone intentionally net setting output.publicPath but suddenly having publicPath as / in html-webpack-plugin.