Frontend Development › Frontend Build Tooling

Static Assets

Images, fonts and files served as-is.

Static assets are files that go to the browser unchanged: images, fonts, icons, PDFs and similar. They don’t need code to run on the server, so the server or a CDN can send them straight out.

On the frontend, many build tools have a folder such as public/ whose contents are copied as they are. When your code imports an asset, the build often renames it with a content hash, such as logo.3f9a1c.png. The name changes whenever the file changes, so browsers can cache it for a long time without ever showing an old version.

<img src="/images/logo.3f9a1c.png" alt="Example Shop logo">

On the backend, serve assets with the correct content type and caching headers, or push them to object storage behind a CDN rather than sending them through your application code.

The classic mistake is saving user-uploaded files in the same folder as the application code. A server that’s rebuilt or replaced during a deployment can lose those files. Keep uploads in storage that outlives the application, as described in ephemeral filesystem.