Should Wayfinder generated files be committed to Git or ignored?

[Caio-Tera]

Hi everyone,

I'm using Laravel Wayfinder (laravel/wayfinder and laravel/vite-plugin-wayfinder) and I've run into a question about Git best practices.

Every time I restart the development server (npm run dev), Wayfinder seems to regenerate about 120 files. This happens consistently, even if I've made zero changes to my actual source code (no new controllers, routes, or React components).

This creates a lot of noise in my Git workflow, as I always have 120+ files listed as "modified" or "untracked" just from restarting the server.

My core question is: What is the correct approach for handling these files?

1. Are these files considered build artifacts (like public/build) and should be added to .gitignore and never committed?
2. Or are these files meant to be part of the repository, and this is perhaps a bug in the beta version (e.g., non-deterministic file generation) that causes them to change unnecessarily?

I just want to confirm the intended workflow before adding them all to .gitignore.

Thanks for the help!

[macropay-solutions]

There is a 3rd question. Do these files change when your code changes?

[Caio-Tera]

Hi, thanks for the follow-up.

To answer your question directly: Yes, they do change when I modify my controllers or route definitions, which is the behavior I would expect.

My confusion comes from the fact that they also change when nothing in my source code has been modified.

My development environment is a Docker container using Laravel Sail, and I run Octane (with FrankenPHP) and Vite using Supervisor. This is my supervisor.conf setup:

[program:octane]
command=sh -c "php /app/artisan octane:start --server=frankenphp --host=0.0.0.0 --port=${APP_PORT} --admin-port=2019 --watch"
autostart=true
autorestart=true
user=sail
stdout_logfile=/dev/stdout
stdout_logfile_maxbytes=0
stderr_logfile=/dev/stderr
stderr_logfile_maxbytes=0

# Processo para o Vite Dev Server (HMR)
[program:vite]
command=npm run dev -- --host
autostart=true
autorestart=true
user=sail
stdout_logfile=/dev/stdout
stdout_logfile_maxbytes=0
stderr_logfile=/dev/stderr
stderr_logfile_maxbytes=0

Every time I start the container (sail up), or when the Octane watcher (--watch) restarts the server, Wayfinder regenerates all ~120 files in resources/js/ (inside the actions/, routes/, and wayfinder/ directories).

These files then all appear in git status as "modified".

As a developer who has never used a tool like this before, this was very confusing. I wasn't sure if this was normal or if I was supposed to commit these files. I've looked through the Wayfinder documentation but couldn't find any official recommendation on whether these generated frontend files should be tracked by Git or ignored.

This seems like something that should be clarified. Laravel is fantastic for all developers, including those of us who don't automatically know the intended workflow for every new tool and are just trying to figure things out.

So my core question remains: should I be committing these files, or should they be in .gitignore?

[macropay-solutions]

Bases on your answer to our question we would pick to ignore them. Lets wait for other opinions.

[macropay-solutions]

Do you commit a package-lock.json?

[Caio-Tera]

Yes. I think it's important.