What is the purpose of getTransformedHtml?

[Oleg-Arkhipov]

I've read the docs and studied the SSR examples in rspack-contrib/rstack-examples.
I understand that I can use getTransformedHtml to have JS/CSS/preload/prefetch tags automatically included in my HTML template.

However, if I'm not mistaken, getTransformedHtml can only be used in development mode, as it requires instantiating a dev server.
So, for a production server I have to use another technique - namely reading manifest and including aforementioned tags myself. If I have to use it anyway, then I can just drop getTransformedHtml and apply manual way to a dev server too, just for the simplicity's sake, to not have extra difference, etc.

Do I miss something?

[9aoy]

getTransformedHtml is a convenient api to get HTML during development. It can directly read the HTML from the outputFileSystem, regardless of whether the output is written to disk or not. And getTransformedHtml ensures that you always get the latest HTML content as the HTML / JS content may change during the development, while providing caching functionality.

[Oleg-Arkhipov]

Regarding "ensures that you always get the latest HTML content" - does using manifest not do that, and so is not recommended for development? Because there getTransformedHtml is not used - does the example have problems with stale content in development mode?