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Version: 5.0

Assets and Files

There are two ways to add an asset to your Redwood app:

  1. co-locate it with the component using it and import it into the component as if it were code
  2. add it to the web/public directory and reference it relative to your site's root

Where possible, prefer the first strategy. It lets webpack include the asset in the bundle, opting-in to all of webpack's benefits.

Co-locating and Importing Assets​

Let's say you want to show your app's logo in your Header component. First, add your logo to the Header component's directory:

web/src/components/Header/
├── logo.png
├── Header.js
├── Header.stories.js
└── Header.test.js

Then, in the Header component, import your logo as if it were code:

web/src/components/Header/Header.js
import logo from './logo.png'

const Header = () => {
  return (
    <header>
      {/* ... */}
      <img src={logo} alt="Logo" />
    </header>
  )
}

export default Header

If you're curious how this works, see the webpack docs on asset management.

Adding to the web/public Directory​

You can also add assets to the web/public directory, effectively adding static files to your app. During dev and build, Redwood copies web/public's contents into web/dist.

Changes to web/public don't hot-reload.

Again, because assets in this directory don't go through webpack, use this strategy sparingly, and mainly for assets like favicons, manifests, robots.txt, libraries incompatible with webpack—etc.

Example: Adding Your Logo and Favicon to web/public​

Let's say that you've added your logo and favicon to web/public:

web/public/
├── img/
│  └── logo.png
└── favicon.png

When you run yarn rw dev and yarn rw build, Redwood copies web/public/img/logo.png to web/dist/img/logo.png and web/public/favicon.png to web/dist/favicon.png:

web/dist/
├── static/
│  ├── js/
│  └── css/
├── img/
│  └── logo.png
└── favicon.png

You can reference these files in your code without any special handling:

web/src/components/Header/Header.js
import { Head } from '@redwoodjs/web'

const Header = () => {
  return (
    <>
      <Head>
        <link rel="icon" type="image/png" href="favicon.png" />
      </Head>
      <img src="img/logo.png" alt="Logo" />
    </>
  )
}

export default Header