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Manage static assets

tip

Hydrogen 2.0 is out now. These archival Hydrogen 1.0 docs are provided only to assist developers during their upgrade process. Please migrate to Hydrogen 2.0 as soon as possible.

When building your custom storefront, it can be useful to have access to static assets that aren't already hosted elsewhere, like images. This guide describes how to reference and serve static assets in Hydrogen.

Change the base URL​

If you want to serve your static assets from a different domain or path, then you can specify the HYDROGEN_ASSET_BASE_URL environment variable when building your project.

For example, running the following command will cause references to /icon.png to instead reference https://mycdn.example/path/to/folder/icon.png in the compiled code.


$ HYDROGEN_ASSET_BASE_URL=https://mycdn.example/path/to/folder yarn build

Note: Make sure to check the dist/client/index.html file to verify that the URLs point to the provided URL.

Version the assets​

If asset content hasn't changed but you want to regenerate the already-compiled assets, then you can use the following configuration:


// vite.config.js
export default {
  plugins: [hydrogen({assetHashVersion: 'v2'})]
}

The configuration adds an optional string to force all files to be recompiled with a new hash. This can be helpful when the asset is cached but you want to change the behavior of your cache or the response headers that are currently cached, such as in a CDN or user's browser.