Speed up page load in production when using Laravel Mix

[MircoBabin]

Laravel Mix is a great tool, but it slows down loading the page. This is because upon each request the mix-manifest.json file is json_decode()-ed in the mix() function.

framework/src/Illuminate/Foundation/Mix.php

Line 54 in 4b5ce19

$manifests[$manifestPath] = json_decode(file_get_contents($manifestPath), true);

This is not needed and total overkill in production, because in production mix-manifest.json will never change. Ok, it will change when a new version is deployed, but between deployments it will never change.

Some years ago I programmed my own caching solution for this problem and published it today. See my comment: laravel-mix/laravel-mix#3367 (comment)