Creating a Production Build

npm run build creates a build directory with a production build of your app. Inside the build/static directory will be your JavaScript and CSS files. Each filename inside of build/static will contain a unique hash of the file contents. This hash in the file name enables long term caching techniques.

When running a production build of freshly created Create React App application, there are a number of .js files (called chunks) that are generated and placed in the build/static/js directory:

main.[hash].chunk.js

• This is your application code. App.js, etc.[number].[hash].chunk.js

• These files can either be vendor code, or code splitting chunks. Vendor code includes modules that you've imported from within nodemodules. One of the potential advantages with splitting your _vendor and application code is to enable long term caching techniques to improve application loading performance. Since vendor code tends to change less often than the actual application code, the browser will be able to cache them separately, and won't re-download them each time the app code changes.runtime~main.[hash].js

• This is a small chunk of webpack runtime logic which is used to load and run your application. The contents of this will be embedded in your build/index.html file by default to save an additional network request. You can opt out of this by specifying INLINE_RUNTIME_CHUNK=false as documented in our advanced configuration, which will load this chunk instead of embedding it in your index.html.If you're using code splitting to split up your application, this will create additional chunks in the build/static folder as well.

Static File Caching

Each file inside of the build/static directory will have a unique hash appended to the filename that is generated based on the contents of the file, which allows you to use aggressive caching techniques to avoid the browser re-downloading your assets if the file contents haven't changed. If the contents of a file changes in a subsequent build, the filename hash that is generated will be different.

To deliver the best performance to your users, it's best practice to specify a Cache-Control header for index.html, as well as the files within build/static. This header allows you to control the length of time that the browser as well as CDNs will cache your static assets. If you aren't familiar with what Cache-Control does, see this article for a great introduction.

Using Cache-Control: max-age=31536000 for your build/static assets, and Cache-Control: no-cache for everything else is a safe and effective starting point that ensures your user's browser will always check for an updated index.html file, and will cache all of the build/static files for one year. Note that you can use the one year expiration on build/static safely because the file contents hash is embedded into the filename.