How to Hide your React Source Code from Getting Displayed in Chrome Dev Tools when Deployed to Production

Do you know that when you deploy your React application which is created using create-react-app or your own webpack configuration to a live website like Netlify, Vercel, Heroku etc,

your entire source code is visible to everyone from the sources tab of the dev tools.

This is not an issue with the create-react-app but all of the source code is added because of the source map which helps to easily identify the source of the bug that will occur on the live site in the future.

This is fine If the website source code is publicly available on GitHub.

But you definitely don't want everyone to see your entire source code If it's a private repository or you're working on a client project.

There is an easy way to fix it.

Create a file with the name .env in your project folder with the below code inside it:

GENERATE_SOURCEMAP=false

Now, when you run or command from the terminal, It will generate a folder with minified files without a source map that you can deploy to the production.

Check out my this article to understand how to hide source map when using custom webpack configuration

Removing the source map also decreases the final bundle size of your application and so your application will load faster.

Thanks for reading!

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