Building for production by default copies all files and folders from public (frustrating first time user experience)

[garygreen]

Describe the bug

I am a first time user of Vite, trying to give it a go. An issue I've ran into straight away is building for production library mode seems to copy all files and folders from public, even though the entry point is a super simple basic js file that doesn't import any of the files it's copied.

If you take a look at the reproduction url take a look at the dist folder that vite has built - it included these files and folder:

For our project those folders that it's copying is absolutely huge (gigabytes) and it actually looks like it's frozen the build process whilst it's copying all those files. Those public files aren't even used at all or referenced anywhere in the js - they just happen to sit in public because they should be publicly accessible, but have nothing to do with our build tools or bundle.

This is quite a frustrating experience as first timer coming to Vite. I've never experienced a bundler copy such a mass amount of files that weren't even referenced in the bundle.

Is this a bug? Or if it's working as intended, is it a sensible default? Is there somewhere in the docs I'm missing?

Reproduction

https://stackblitz.com/edit/vitejs-vite-bf6npy?file=main.js,public%2Fvite.svg&terminal=dev

Steps to reproduce

No response

System Info

System:
    OS: Windows 10 10.0.19043
    CPU: (4) x64 Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-2500K CPU @ 3.30GHz    
    Memory: 8.97 GB / 15.98 GB
  Binaries:
    Node: 16.13.2 - C:\Program Files\nodejs\node.EXE
    Yarn: 1.9.4 - C:\Program Files (x86)\Yarn\bin\yarn.CMD   
    npm: 5.10.0 - E:\Sites\cc-new\node_modules\.bin\npm.CMD  
  Browsers:
    Edge: Spartan (44.19041.1266.0), Chromium (106.0.1370.52)

Used Package Manager

npm

Logs

No response

Validations

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• Read the Contributing Guidelines.
• Read the docs.
• Check that there isn't already an issue that reports the same bug to avoid creating a duplicate.
• Make sure this is a Vite issue and not a framework-specific issue. For example, if it's a Vue SFC related bug, it should likely be reported to vuejs/core instead.
• Check that this is a concrete bug. For Q&A open a GitHub Discussion or join our Discord Chat Server.
• The provided reproduction is a minimal reproducible example of the bug.

[randName]

It is documented here: https://vitejs.dev/guide/assets.html#the-public-directory

Though I agree you do have a slight point about it not being the default behavior if unconfigured.

[zettadam]

This is a problem if you are building a library and you put any files not related to production output inside /public directory. Let's say you have example image files you use as props (URL or path to those images) when developing React components in Storybook (with vite builder which started using a single vite.config). I think these files should not be part of a NPM package unless specifically selected (or configured).

[randName]

I see that #10550 was recently added too.

I just thought of a suggestion, which is getting the total size of publicDir before copying (also a recursive action) and emitting a warning if the total size or total number of files crosses a certain threshold. the check can be skipped if options have been explicitly set.

[bluwy]

Closing this as #10550 should fix this.