Hi, I’m working on a project that requires generating and serving a (potentially large) number of static HTML files. Since the project also uses Phoenix, I’d like to take advantage of Phoenix’s ability to quickly render HTML templates with layouts, sanitizing contents, etc.

I know I could classify these HTML files as templates and use Phoenix.View, pattern: "**/*", root: "path/to/generated/html" to find all of them, then use render to serve them, but that requires compiling each generated file into a template, and I’m guessing (big assumption, please tell me if I’m wrong) that it recompiles all of them whenever a new file is added. I think this would become unwieldy with large numbers of files and frequent changes.

Alternatively, I could forego the view/template system entirely and use EEX.eval_file/1 to create the static files and just serve them with send_file, but that would be throwing out most/all of the benefits that Phoenix templating provides.

My question: is there a middle ground that allows me to use Phoenix’s HTML rendering/sanitizing/more goodies without necessarily compiling a large number of frequently-changing static HTML files into templates every time a new file is added/changed? I’ve looked at the source code for Phoenix.View and it’s not clear if this is possible.

To be fair, as noted above I only briefly explored the “make every file a template” option, so I could be wrong about how Phoenix decides what to compile when something changes.