make build-theme never cleans, so artifacts from a previous build can leak into the bundle

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Assessment

Difficulty
2/5
Estimated time
1-3 hours
Newbie friendliness
86/100
Issue type
Bug
Clarity
Clearly specified
Activity status
Active
Tech stack
node.js, playwright, typescript
Domain
build-system, testing-qa

Research direction

Start with the Makefile build-theme target and inspect the npm run clean script, which removes rimraf public/build build api. Add the clean step before the existing deployment cleanup, then build two theme revisions and compare their rendered output using the workflow documented in tests/visual/README.md and configured by playwright.config.ts.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

maintenance

The build-theme target removes only .deploy/<theme> before building. It then runs npm run prod:build, and neither the target nor that script runs npm run clean (rimraf public/build build api), so whatever build/ and public/build already contain survives the build — and Makefile lines 21-22 copy both directories wholesale into the bundle.

Step What it clears
rm -rf .deploy/$(THEME) the deploy directory only
npm run prod:build nothing — prod:copy, build:thebe, build:css, remix build, relative-css-asset-urls.mjs
cp -r public / cp -r build copies both into the bundle, stale files included

The consequence that matters is for A/B comparisons: building one revision, then another, and diffing the rendered output. This was hit while working on #225, where a bundle intended as the "baseline" rendered as the candidate instead, and npm run clean before building fixed it. I have verified the missing clean step and the wholesale copy above; I have not reproduced the exact file that leaked, so I would not want the issue to assert a precise mechanism beyond that. A plain single build is generally fine in practice, since remix build rewrites its own entry bundle each time — the hazard is stale other files and anything that compares two revisions.

That pattern is not exotic here: tests/visual/README.md and playwright.config.ts both document diffing one theme build against another as the way to validate a visual change, and THEME_TEMPLATE exists precisely to support it. So the trap sits directly in a documented workflow, and it fails silently — the comparison produces a plausible-looking result rather than an error.

Suggested fix

Add the clean to the target, so the documented workflow is safe by default:

build-theme: check
	npm run clean
	rm -rf .deploy/$(THEME)

Failing that, a note in tests/visual/README.md's "To diff one theme build against another" recipe and in CONTRIBUTING.md would at least make it discoverable. The target is already slow enough that a rimraf of three directories is not a meaningful cost.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

Dominant language
TypeScript
Stars
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Forks
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Avg merge
1d 6h
Merged PRs (30d)
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