Publishing Angular2SPA includes node_modules

[MikeHook]

AFAIK the node_modules should not be needed as they are precompiled into the vendor.js file.
I removed them from my project by taking the folder out of the publishOptions include list in project.json. However the site only works then if the asp-prerender tag is also removed from the home page markup.

Also tried adding the aspnet-prerendering module to the webpack.config.vendor.js list but then the compiled javascript didn't run.

[MrCrimp]

This is because the template you use is set up with server side rendering.
Unless I completely misunderstood how this works, node_modules is needed if you use server rendering (the asp-prerender tag) since this tag instructs the server to start a node.js process to do it's work before returning the resulting HTML to the client, where your client side javascript takes over. The node.js process needs node_modules to be present for this to work, it does'nt use your webpack bundles for it's internal work.

[boban100janovski]

As @MrCrimp said "node_modules" folder is needed for pre-rendering, just remove the "asp-prerender-module" tag from the MVC view and it will work (as you already know 😄)

[SteveSandersonMS]

You are all correct - node_modules is needed if and only if you're doing server-side prerendering. Since that is on by default, that directory is also published by default.

[MikeHook]

Thanks for clearing that up guys :)

[SteveSandersonMS]

Update: Deploying node_modules to production continues to cause trouble for people, so in the latest templates, we've eliminated the need to do that.

If you get the latest generator-aspnetspa-core and create a new project, you'll find its webpack config now builds a completely self-contained server-side prerendering bundle which never needs to reference node_modules at runtime. Therefore the default publishing config no longer includes node_modules at all.