We also hit this and it made me wish it was possible to just copy <publicDir> right into <build.outDir> without putting those files in the root + maintaining the same directory structure. Then the path-ing would work as you'd expect even after building and still be compatible with any import.meta.env.BASE_URL concatenation in JavaScript.

It feels counter intuitive that everything else paths the way you'd expect except for files in the <publicDir>. I was trying to explain to another developer that <publicDir> is unique and they should "pretend" it's in the root and it really didn't click. (Especially because it does work in dev mode as @GrygrFlzr notes!)

I'd probably advocate for control of where <publicDir> ends up in builds (or a breaking change that makes it work as I suggested above) vs. purposely making the dev server work not as you'd expect to force this mechanism.

(I do recognize that would lead to favicon.ico and robots.txt not being in their "default" locations, but that's already true if you are using base, correct?)

@patak-js Did this actually get addressed with that commit? I may have overlooked it but that seemed to be only changes related to Stylus.

Nope. That's a typo in the commit message, they intended to close #2857, not this issue. Reopening.

What's the rationale for this being a feature that the dev server currently works differently than production in this way? I was actually just coming here to report a bug when a member of my team imported some assets from the root directory instead of putting them in "public", which would have caused it to break in production had I not caught it.

For now, vite will warn about the unexpected requests for publicDir. See details in #4631. Do we still need an explicit option to disable "root is public"?

I agree with @hyf0 here. After #4631, the main problem the new option is trying to solve shouldn't occur as the users will see a clear warning: Playground.

We also discussed in a team meeting that the Vite server should keep working as an enhanced static server over the root directory, as this is part of the mental model of Vite.