Public/scripts/manifest.asset.php not found - what generates it?

From (pre-bud, mix-based) Sage v10.0.0-beta.1: October 21st, 2021, I’m using acorn v2.0.0-alpha.0 and getting the following error:

Asset [/srv/www/.../public/scripts/manifest.asset.php] not found.

In the edit pages when acorn hits line 35 of setup.php:

if ($manifest = asset('scripts/manifest.asset.php')->load()) {

I had seen this yesterday and forget what I did to solve it. Have tried removing and reinstalling composer.json (having cleared cache, deleted lock file and vendor dir) as well as npm packages.

Is webpack supposed to generate/copy this manifest file? What I’m seeing is public/scripts/manifest.js (and public/mix-manifest.json).

Webpack config file matches this one, except for having removed the .block(... method.

Styles and Scripts generated are:

/scripts/app.js │ 4.21 
/scripts/customizer.js │ 3.05 KiB
/scripts/manifest.js │ 7.05 KiB
/scripts/vendor.js │ 811 KiB 
/styles/app.css │ 3.85 MiB
/styles/editor.css │ 802 bytes

Thank much.

–Mike

Hey wait!!!

Reintroducing mix.blocks( which I had removed following this 1 line fix when vendor.js is missing, now scripts/manifest.asset.php is present again.

The vendor.js file is also present (this time), but I’m not sure if it will continue to exist with future builds.

Can someone clarify what’s going on here?