This behavior was not modified by#38495: when the manifest file does not exist, the asset helper always throws an exception (already in4.4).
If we are to change it, this is a new feature that should target 6.2.

Personally, I enable strict mode on all environments. So yes, thenpm run build is required before running the tests or opening a page on dev environment.

What is the point of requiringwebpack-encore-bundle inwebapp-pack if running the webpack job is optional?

The webapp pack experience is plain broken right now, we cannot afford to wait for 6.2 to fix it.
Any alternative idea? Removing webpack encore from the pack?

/cc@weaverryan

An other alternative would be to create an empty manifest.json file 🙄.

But not installingwebpack-encore-bundle by default would make easier to understand why npm/yarn is required.

I think we don't include Encore - so mergesymfony/webapp-pack#7 . Runningcomposer require encore is still very easy. And as@GromNaN said, you then know that you will need npm/yarn to run some other commands.

Even if try to include Encore, but without an error, it's not super useful. It would do nothing until you ran the npm/yarn commands. So if you already will need to run some commands, probablycomposer require encore isn't a big extra command to need to run :).

Closing in favor ofsymfony/webapp-pack#7