What is limiting the JavaScript files the Phoenix server can see?

Uh, but Phoenix doesn’t host out of assets by default, it hosts out of ./priv/static by default, do you have a nav.js in there?

Whatever build system you use at the very least either needs to concat nav into app (the default one that phoenix uses, brunch, does that automatically) or you need to have it copy nav to the output priv/static directory.

My brunch file has

javascripts: {
      joinTo: {
        'app.js': /^js/,
        'nav.js': /^js\/navigation/

The priv subdirectories don’t actually have the app.js file, which is what’s confusing me even more.

I’m currently just using the default Phoenix development settings. I don’t dare push to production without being sure.

This means that everything in the js/navigation directory in assets will be compiled to nav.js, but your listing had no such directory, so that does nothing. Currently app.js is taking in everything under js, so nav is being put into it too.

Should be in something like priv/static/js/app.js or so, and only once you either start the dev server or so.

My apologies for not including full details of my solution:

/navigation
  /master.js

Exists in my /js directory.

I can remove the js subdirectories, but at the moment I’m just testing that brunch works and I wanted to see master.js compiled to nav.js but I’m not seeing that.

I doubt it still would, the app.js is grabbing everything under js, including the things in the navigation folder, so when the nav.js entry is hit there is nothing left for it to take. Fixup the app regex to exclude the navigation directory to start.

Wow. I wouldn’t have thought of it as ‘grabbing everything’ in the sense of removing stuff (would have thought it works more cp than mv). I thought it was just spidering the directories. I have a few things I need to do right now but if your solution works I’ll be very impressed!

Brunch is powerful, but it does have a few specific things to be aware of, all in its documentation though.

Yeah. When you’re unemployed and trying to put a showcase site together you tend to go with getting functionality up first. I did read some of the documentation but urg, sometimes it’s difficult to juggle stuff :/. Will have more of a look tomorrow.

Ok, I now have this:

javascripts: {
      joinTo: {
        'nav.js': /^js\/navigation/

in my brunch file, and have even removed all of the import statements in my app.js file, but it’s still compiling all the JavaScript into a single app.js file

I think one of the issues you are battling is that the second pattern covers files that are already included in the first pattern. The easiest way to deal with that is to move everything that is under /js but not in /js/navigation into a separate folder like /js/app. Then rewrite the configuration as:

      joinTo: {
        'app.js': /^js\/app/,
        'nav.js': /^js\/navigation/

According to documentation that should give you two separate files.