Strip console logs from production builds

Proposal: Automatically remove console.log statements from production builds while still keeping them in development builds.

Reasoning: Log statements can be useful to keep in development builds. However, they can be unnecessary and potentially sensitive to include in production builds. Currently, CRA does nothing with console logs, so if you want to have log messages in development, they must be manually removed for a production build.

Potential Solutions: There is a webpack loader that can strip aritrary code including console logs https://github.com/yahoo/strip-loader. We could also update our use UglifyJsPlugin and provide the drop_console option to the compressor.

Downsides: Anytime code is removed from builds weird situations can arise. Particularly bad would be unintentional side effects inside of a console log statement, which would be removed only in production and may lead to hard to debug problems. Additionally, there may be times where you deliberately want to include specific log messages in production. We would then have to support a way to flag certain console log lines to not be stripped.

I wanted to open the discussion because I couldn’t find any prior issues about this feature.

[omninonsense]

Sorry to comment on a closed issue, but what about only stripping console.debug? I agree that log, warn and error should remain, though.

[alexgvozden]

@tbillington you are absolutely right, this is my mistake best address for this is react-native-cli 😃 sorry for an opinionated discussion