web dev//build

A build is the compilation step of a web project that turns source code (React, TypeScript, Sass and so on) into static files the browser can execute directly (HTML, CSS and JavaScript), and it exists because the browser cannot run the source as written. The browser runs JS on V8 (Chrome, Edge) or SpiderMonkey (Firefox), and it does not understand TypeScript or JSX: it needs plain JS.

A build is the compilation step of a web project that turns source code (React, TypeScript, Sass and so on) into static files the browser can execute directly (HTML, CSS and JavaScript), and it exists because the browser cannot run the source as written. The browser runs JS on V8 (Chrome, Edge) or SpiderMonkey (Firefox), and it does not understand TypeScript or JSX: it needs plain JS.

The output goes into a dist/ (or build/) folder of minified files, hashed filenames for cache-busting and optimized assets. The usual tools are Vite (which writes dist/ only in build mode; in dev mode it serves files from memory with HMR), Webpack, esbuild, Parcel and Rollup.

In production, dist/ is what gets uploaded to the server, and Cloudflare Pages serves those static files from the edge. Locally, Wrangler can serve dist/ to simulate the production environment (wrangler pages dev dist).