Proposal: a static files directory that gets auto-published

[llimllib]

The use case:

I'm making a chart and I want to include some team logos, so I stick them in a folder, maybe /docs/logos.

Then I make a plot:

Plot.plot({marks: [Plot.image(stats, { x: "a", y: "b", src:`docs/logos/${team}.svg`})]})

Of course, this doesn't work because the SVGs aren't referenced anywhere that observable knows about, and so the path /docs/logos isn't found.

The proposal:

/docs/static or /static or something like that ought to be a directory for static assets to live that you can reference unconditionally, and is always carried over into the built site. That way, you can just stick images somewhere in /docs/static, reference them in a plot, and no monkey business is required.

The alternatives:

I know that I could make a FileAttachement for each image, or zip them all up and pull them out of a zip file.

Both of those seem like unnecessaary work, when all I want to do is reference the images in a graph.

(Have I missed an alternative?)

[Fil]

This comes up often and is discussed in #169.

[llimllib]

Thanks, I did look but somehow missed that issue

[llimllib]

So that’s just a wontfix currently? A reference is required? What is the sensible thing to do in my case with 362 images?

[Fil]

I'd say that the answer currently depends on whether these images change on each build. One solution is probably to copy the files over to _files/assets/ after build and before deploy?

So that’s just a wontfix currently?

I'm pretty sure we'll have to find a solution for this, we're just not there yet. Please keep pushing with example use cases :)