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/Improving Builds with Postbuild Scripts
Improving Builds with Postbuild Scripts
Learn how we can improve our Astro builds with postbuild scripts.
We'll cover the following...
Astro’s default build process takes care of many things to improve the final production version of an Astro application. However, sometimes, we might need extra custom steps that can only be achieved through the use of postbuild scripts. These scripts are custom JavaScript files that run after the build process, therefore the name postbuild scripts. In this lesson, we’ll take a look at how to create a postbuild script that also performs common cleanup processes after Astro’s default build process.
The build script
To create postbuild steps, we need to create a separate build script that executes code after the astro build command finishes running. In the following code widget, we’ll find a build.js file inside the scripts folder. Inspect the contents of the file in the following widget:
import * as child from 'child_process';
const buildScript = 'astro build';
child.spawn(buildScript, {
stdio: ['ignore', 'inherit', 'inherit'],
shell: true,
}).on('exit', code => {
// Define postbuild steps
console.log('✅ Running post-build step...')
// The rest of the code should be placed inside this event listener
// to ensure it runs after the build process is completed.
});
In the snippet above, child.spawn is used to execute the astro build script. We configure it to run within a shell environment by setting shell: true. This is particularly useful for executing complex commands or scripts that depend on the shell environment. The stdio option is configured to ensure that the output of the build process is visible in our terminal, providing direct feedback on the build process.
We make use of Node.js’s child_process to execute the astro build script. It’s configured to run inside of a shell using the shell property. When this process completes (meaning Astro’s build process is finished), an ...