Remove exposed JavaScript source maps in production

Exposed JavaScript source maps in a production environment reveal your original, unminified, unobfuscated source code — including comments, variable names, and full application logic — even when your actual deployed code has been minified specifically to reduce file size and, incidentally, obscure the code's readability.

This exposure undermines whatever protective benefit code minification might have incidentally provided, giving anyone who discovers these source maps complete, readable access to your application's actual internal logic — this can reveal genuine implementation details, potentially including comments discussing known limitations, planned features, or other information never intended for public visibility.

Source maps serve genuinely important legitimate purposes during development, allowing developers to debug against readable source code even while testing against minified production builds — the issue isn't the source maps' existence during development, but their inadvertent inclusion in the actual public-facing production deployment where they provide no legitimate value to end users while creating this genuine exposure.

Remediation typically involves adjusting your build process to exclude source map generation, or at minimum public deployment, specifically for production builds while retaining this development-time debugging capability in your actual development and staging environments where this functionality provides genuine value without the corresponding public exposure risk.