How to serve lazy-loaded Vue JS chunks from CDN

Question

I work on a single-page application written in Vue.js 3 and built by Vue CLI 5 (Webpack 5). The app is being served from a Laravel app which is deployed to AWS by Laravel Vapor. This tool also uploads all static assets (including JS chunks) to AWS S3 and make them available via CloudFront.

I want to load all static assets used in the Vue.js app from this CDN. The URL of the CloudFront distribution is available at build time in ASSET_URL environment variable. I have written my own asset functions in both TS and SCSS which are able to resolve asset paths properly for both local development and production environment. I use these functions whenever I write a URL of a static asset (image, font, etc.) in either .scss or .vue file and everything works fine.

But I am not able to make Vue.js app load JS chunks from CDN. When I modify publicPath option in vue.config.js, Vue Router gets broken. If I try to change output.publicPath directly in Webpack config, I get an error from Vue CLI saying that I cannot modify it directly.

So I have written a script that rewrites all URLs pointing to static assets in the generated index.blade.php file (similar to index.html in a typical Vue.js project) and initial JS chunks are loaded from CDN now. However, all lazy-loaded chunks are still being loaded from the server where Laravel app is deployed. It looks like these paths are somehow defined the generated app.f73fadef.js file.

So my question is, how can I load all static assets (including JS chunks) from CDN while serving an app from a dynamic web server? Is it even possible to do this just by changing Vue CLI or Webpack config and without any dirty "hacks" (like modifying generated JS files)?

Answer 1

I have finally been able to solve this. The problem was caused by the following router initialization code:

createRouter({
  history: createWebHistory(process.env.BASE_URL),
  routes,
});

Once I remove the parameter of createWebHistory function, I was able to set publicPath option in vue.config.js to my CloudFront distribution URL and everything started to work properly. I was even able to remove my own script that changed the URLs in index.blade.php since it was no longer needed.