Docusaurus i18n build duplicates static assets per language, causing excessive site size

[willeastcott]

Description:

We’re using Docusaurus with i18n enabled for the PlayCanvas Developer Site. The site is structured as follows:

• docs/ – English documentation
• i18n/ja/ – Japanese translations
• static/ – Shared images and other static assets used by both languages

When building the site, Docusaurus appears to duplicate the entire static/ directory for each locale in the output (e.g. once for English, once for Japanese), even though the contents are identical.

Because the static/ folder contains a large number of images, this results in hundreds of megabytes of duplicated data per language. On GitHub Pages, where there is a hard 1 GB limit, this quickly becomes a serious problem as more locales or assets are added.

Expected behavior:

Ideally, shared static assets should be emitted only once and referenced by all locales, rather than copied per-language. At minimum, we should investigate a way to configure the build so that large shared assets are not duplicated across locale outputs.

Impact:

• Significantly inflated build size
• Risk of exceeding GitHub Pages size limits
• Slower builds and deployments

Notes:

This may require:

• A Docusaurus configuration change
• A custom build step or plugin
• Or restructuring how shared assets are handled

Raising this issue to track investigation and agree on a sustainable solution.