Serving files
There are a lot of ways that files of various types can be served in Moodle and various API to help do it correctly. This page aims to link together all the various ways in one place with the pros and cons and best practice of each way.
Factors to consider
Security
Performance and caching
One of the driving
Ways of serving files
Javascript files
For all javascript files whether files you have written yourself or 3rd party bundle libraries see: Javascript Modules
CSS files
File API and pluginfile.php
File API#Serving files to users
Data format API
If you need to generate a structured file on demand such as a CSV or Excel it is generally best to use the Data formats API. The Data format API can also be used in conjunction with the pluginfile API.
Direct from Apache / nginx
This is only included for completeness and in general you should almost never serve files of any type directly from your web server. As a rule of thumb you should be able to comment out the native file serving directives in your nginx config and everything should still work because all files are served through php rather than directly. This may seem like it would be worse for performance in some cases, but it is actually better as Moodle is designed to sit behind a reverse proxy caching server or a CDN like Cloudflare, Cloudfront etc.
