Symfony4 Deployment with Encore - deployment

Question

The current documentation says, that I only need the files under public/build, created with ./node_modules/.bin/encore production, when I want to deploy for production. But also to add public/build to git ignore. Do I have to copy the content of public/build manually?
In Symfony3 my deploy looked like that:
git pull
bin/php bin/console cache:clear --env=prod --no-debug
bin/php bin/console assets:install --env=prod
bin/php bin/console assetic:dump --env=prod --no-debug

Answer 1

FYI, Using assetic was the »old« way, and starting Symfony 2.8 Assetic is not included in the standard framework anymore (but you can still add it).
Regarding public/build you misunderstood it a bit - the actual source files should be somewhere else, for example in assets/css/app.scss and assets/js/app.js. Using Webpack Encore, running ./node_modules/.bin/encore production will minify, uglify, etc (whatever you configure in webpack.config.js) these source files and then copy the generated files to public/build. So public/build will only contain the generated stuff and thus can be safely added to .gitignore (but you also need to run the encore script in production).
Your JavaScript file (i.e. in this case app.js) should include
require('../css/app.scss');
so that the app.scss is actually a dependency of app.js and you only need to tell the webpack.config.js to include the JavaScript file. The basic configuration of webpack.config.js might look like this:
// webpack.config.js
var Encore = require('#symfony/webpack-encore');
Encore
// this will put all your compiled stuff into public/build, that’s
// why you can put this into .gitignore, because you can re-build this
// from the source files.
.setOutputPath('public/build/')
// the public path used by the web server to access the previous directory
.setPublicPath('/build')
// this will create public/build/app.js, and also public/build/app.css
// since the scss file is a dependency of app.js
.addEntry('app', './assets/js/app.js')
// allow sass/scss files to be processed
.enableSassLoader()
[...]
;
// export the final configuration
module.exports = Encore.getWebpackConfig();
You can find some more explanation under https://symfony.com/doc/current/frontend/encore/simple-example.html (first example) or https://symfony.com/doc/current/frontend.html (overview)