Concepts

Static

It bears repeating that Charge uses React and JSX to generate static HTML on the server-side. It does not render the pages on the client-side in the browser. Charge is especially useful for building small websites where it wouldn’t make sense to serve React to the browser in order to render a simple page.

Files

How your files are handled depends on what type of file it is. Most files will simply be copied from source to target without being changed at all. Templates, JavaScripts, and stylesheets will be processed and then written to the target directory.

Entrypoints

Many build systems or asset pipelines have a concept of “entrypoints” or “bundles”. You configure the build system to take many files from different sources and combine them together into one file, which is then referenced in your HTML. For a simple website there might be one bundle for your JavaScript and one bundle for your stylesheet. For a more complex website there might be multiple bundles of each type.

Charge doesn’t really have this concept, or at least there isn’t any configuration around it. Every file is potentially a “bundle” and how files should be combined together is automatically inferred by figuring out what is a “dependency”.

Dependencies

A dependency is any file that is imported into another file. Let’s use JavaScript files as an example.

If you have index.js and dependency.js and they don’t reference each other in any way, then they will both be copied over and show up in the target directory. But if index.js imports dependency.js, then dependency.js is inferred to be a dependency, which means it will be treated differently in two ways:

1. dependency.js will be bundled/included into index.js
2. dependency.js will not be copied over into the target directory

This should probably be what you would expect to happen. It should fit your mental model of how build systems work. The only difference here is that other systems require you to explicitly configure what is an “entrypoint” and what is a dependency, whereas Charge analyzes the files to automatically figure this out for you.

Clean URLs

Clean URLs are when the .html extensions are dropped from URLs for aesthetic or functional reasons. The .html extensions are now commonly considered superfluous. If you have a file named /projects.html it’s now understood and generally preferred that the URL domain.com/projects would serve that file.

Charge does not have a particular opinion about whether you use Clean URLs or not. The development server will serve the right files regardless of if you use URLs with .html extensions or without.

However, it’s important to note that “clean URLs” is a deployment and/or hosting concern. That means when you build your site for deployment, Charge does not do anything to try and support clean URLs, because Charge can’t know where you plan to deploy the static site and how they might or might not handle clean URLs. It’s up to you to deploy your site using a service that supports the URL structure you want.

The section on Deployment also covers clean URLs to save you some time identifying the right place to host your site.