[▲ Vercel Community](/) · [Categories](/categories) · [Latest](/latest) · [Top](/top) · [Live](/live) [Feedback](/c/feedback/8) # Unignoring files for static deployments (feature request) 82 views · 2 likes · 6 posts Joe Pea (@trusktr) · 2025-05-13 Please allow unignoring files or folders for deployments. This issue was a pain, especially when Vercel broke my site without warning (how rude!): https://github.com/vercel/vercel/issues/10791 See also: https://github.com/vercel/vercel/issues/3747 It is totally valid to `npm install` things, then run a static website that imports files from `node_modules` using native browser-builtin `import`. When such a site gets deployed to Vercel, it does not work. :frowning: Having a hard-coded ignore rules that cannot be overridden seems unreasonably restrictive. Can you please allow overriding the ignores? Anshuman Bhardwaj (@anshumanb) · 2025-05-13 Hi @trusktr, please share your public repo or a [minimal reproducible example](https://vercel.com/guides/creating-a-minimal-reproducible-example). That will let us all work together from the same code to figure out what’s going wrong. Joe Pea (@trusktr) · 2025-05-15 · ♥ 1 Hi @anshumanb I believe I already described the problem clearly. The problem is that Vercel deletes `node_modules` before deployment as per above. I do not want Vercel to delete `node_modules`. Anshuman Bhardwaj (@anshumanb) · 2025-05-15 · ♥ 1 Thanks for your reply. I'll share this feedback with our team. Joe Pea (@trusktr) · 2025-05-15 Thank you! This caused a headache because at some point Vercel was deploying `node_modules`, but then Vercel decided not to include `node_modules` in the deployment which broke my app. I then had to come up with a workaround (for example rename `node_moduels` to `module` and use that instead, which brought about other issues such as causing the build to sometimes fail for other reasons). Basically the use case I have is this: - I have a static website - the site is built with vanilla JavaScript modules and importmap (native `import` syntax for multi-file JavaScript code organization that the browser loads natively) - I install dependencies for the *front end* with `npm install` which puts those dependencies in `node_modules` - My frontend `<script type=importmap>` defines the import paths for frontend dependencies, for example with mappings like `"some-lib": "/node_modules/some-lib/index.js"` - This works great locally: the browser, at runtime, will fetch from `https://my-site.com/node_modules/some-lib/index.js"` when it encounters an import statement like `import {something} from 'some-lib'` within a JavaScript file. Now, the problem is, this static website that worked perfectly fine locally (or on other static web hosts besides Vercel such as GitHub Pages or any static web host), and when I deploy to Vercel it does not work because Vercel unconditionally deletes the `node_modules` folder from the project before deploying the code, therefore the frontend dependencies are all 404 errors at runtime. The solution to this would be a simple way to unignore the files that Vercel ignores. @anshumanb Until there's a solution to this, I would appreciate the ticket not being marked as solved. (however maybe a label is better suited for that purpose, for example something like "feedback acknowledged" or something, as acknowledging feedback has no publicly-visible tracked guarantee on producing any actual solution). Is the code for this feature accessibly in a public repo? If so, I can try to implement a solution. I would rather not be stuck with a "solved" issue that has no solution. Anshuman Bhardwaj (@anshumanb) · 2025-05-16 Hi @trusktr, thanks for the detailed explanation. We don't have a timeline or ETA on this feature request. I'll keep this thread posted whenever we have an update. I'll not mark it as solved. Thanks for volunteering to help but the code is not in a public repo so we'll have to wait for the team to respond about this feedback.