What is the use for the special "public" folder in a Meteor app?

My question is: since I refer to files inside of public/ directory as if they were located in the root folder of my application, what's the different between putting the files in the public/ folder and in the root folder? Or is it just for organization sake?

Just because you can reference or "import" a file from public/ doesn't mean it functions in the same way to how a normal file import would work. Files located in public gets served as is without being minified/run through the Meteor pipleline. Second, these files are accessible to the client which makes sense given how'd import them without preceding slashes and keep them mostly to serve stuff like favicon and what not.

So in a sense, such files within public are made available within relation to your client bundle/code whilst not being a part of them, get it?

This way of serving assets isn't unique to Meteor, even React has a public directory.

Also the documentation I quoted above makes some examples using assets (some pngs and favicon.ico) and no JavaScript or HTML files. Am I able to put some JavaScript code in there and then import them in another file by referencing as if this code was located in the root of my app? Or is the public/ directory somewhat made only for assets?

AFAIK, you can have files of any type in public but since

• It's served as is to the client, meaning it's exposed to the public
• It doesn't get minified (i.e being part of the final application build code)

You're advised to not have any of the application code within this directory.

The Public folder is how you serve your static files, when you put a file in your root folder it will not be sent to the client by default and you can't use it in your css, when you put that file (say an image) in your public folder you can use it from the css and refer to it as if it was in your root folder, so if I put a.jpg in the public folder I can use url(/a.jpg) in my css, that won't work if a.jpg is simply in your root folder, that's what the docs mean when they say it's served as if it was the root folder.

unlike in Rails, Meteor initiatives don’t have a rigid document structure and you are quite a whole lot free to prepare your projects as you want. a few folder names but have unique which means, and documents within them will be dealt with in a different way. consumer files here will be loaded at the client simplest. files in that folder don’t need things like Meteor.isClient.

server Loaded on the server best, duh! No need for Meteor.isServer whilst files are in that folder, the client won’t see these files. public This directory is for property like photographs. on your initiatives, you reference stuff in the public folder as if they have been in the root folder. as an example, when you have a report: public/nude.jpg, then for your app you include it with . personal files only available at the server facet thru the assets API. checks documents in there received’t be loaded anywhere and are used for checking out your app. lib documents in that folder are loaded earlier than whatever else, which makes it the best listing to vicinity the distinct libraries used on a undertaking.