remove favicon.ico by default

[prabirshrestha]

Angular starterkit uses the following code for favicon. https://github.com/angular/universal-starter/blob/master/src/index.html

  <link rel="icon" href="data:;base64,iVBORw0KGgo=">

It would be good if create-react-app did the same. favicon.ico can also be supported specially for those who want to have custom favicon files that they want to publish.

[gaearon]

This sounds reasonable but we currently don't have a way to copy arbitrary files into the compiled folder. So favicon is treated "specially" and this is why we don't allow removing it.

If we remove it we would also need to introduce a way to add static assets outside the src directory. I think we'll have to do it anyway but it's a separate (existing) issue that warrants more discussion.

[mxstbr]

We could probably detect if a favicon.ico file exists from the webpack config and set the HTMLWebpackPlugin flag accordingly, which might be the nicest option. Then it works if you have a favicon.ico, but it also works if you don't have one?

[gaearon]

If it didn't come bundled, how would you guess that putting favicon.ico in project root magically works? You would probably try to add a link tag yourself, and you would think that you can reference any other file like this (like custom iOS home icons). But surprisingly that won't work.

[mxstbr]

That's actually true, hmm…

[gaearon]

I want to address this. But not as a separate feature. It should be solved at the same time with #28.

[lacker]

What's the downside of the status quo - you just don't like having a favicon.ico file around if you don't want a favicon for your project? It doesn't seem too bad to just use the default one in that case.

[ForbesLindesay]

I would think most projects should have a favicon.ico file at their root. We could perhaps integrate with/recommend http://realfavicongenerator.net/ to people to make it easier for people to get set up with a decent favicon?

[gaearon]

We probably won’t do this unless this is commonly requested. (It doesn’t seem to be so far.)

[andreypopp]

Would be good if html-webpack-plugin could allow to require files from template:

<link rel="icon" require:href="./src/favicon.ico">

Or something like that.

[gaearon]

Yea, this is pretty much how I’d like it to work. Is it definitely not supported? Maybe we’re just doing it some wrong way.

[andreypopp]

Looking at the sources of html-webpack-plugin it seems it is not. Child compiler should be run in a loader instead and require:{href,src,...} — parsed and compiled to require(..) calls.

[andreypopp]

There's html-loader which does a similar thing, wondering if it can be used along with html-webpack-plugin.