ASP.NET Bundles how to disable minification

Question

I have debug="true" in both my web.config(s), and I just don't want my bundles minified, but nothing I do seems to disable it. I've tried enableoptimisations=false, here is my code:

//Javascript
bundles.Add(new ScriptBundle("~/bundles/MainJS")
            .Include("~/Scripts/regular/lib/mvc/jquery.validate.unobtrusive.js*")
            .Include("~/Scripts/regular/lib/mvc/jquery.validate*")
            .Include("~/Scripts/regular/lib/bootstrap.js")
            .IncludeDirectory("~/Scripts/regular/modules", "*.js", true)
            .IncludeDirectory("~/Scripts/regular/pages", "*.js", true)
            .IncludeDirectory("~/Scripts/regular/misc", "*.js", true));

//CSS
bundles.Add(new StyleBundle("~/bundles/MainCSS")
            .Include("~/Content/css/regular/lib/bootstrap.css*")
            .IncludeDirectory("~/Content/css/regular/modules", "*.css", true)
            .IncludeDirectory("~/Content/css/regular/pages", "*.css", true))

Answer 1

There is also some simple way to control minification (and other features) manually. It's new CssMinify() transformer using, like this:

// this is in case when BundleTable.EnableOptimizations = false;
var myBundle = new StyleBundle("~/Content/themes/base/css")
    .Include("~/Content/themes/base/jquery.ui.core.css" /* , ... and so on */);
myBundle.Transforms.Add(new CssMinify());
bundles.Add(myBundle);

// or you can remove that transformer in opposite situation
myBundle.Transforms.Clear();

That's convenient when you want to have some bundles special part only to be minified. Let's say, you are using some standard (jQuery) styles, which are getting under your feet (taking lots of excessive browser requests to them), but you want to keep unminified your own stylesheet. (The same - with javascript).

Answer 2

Conditional compilation directives are your friend:

#if DEBUG
            var jsBundle = new Bundle("~/Scripts/js");
#else
            var jsBundle = new ScriptBundle("~/Scripts/js");
#endif

Answer 3

If you're using LESS/SASS CSS transformation there's an option useNativeMinification which can be set to false to disable minification (in web.config). For my purposes I just change it here when I need to, but you could use web.config transformations to always enable it on release build or perhaps find a way modify it in code.

<less useNativeMinification="false" ieCompat="true" strictMath="false"
      strictUnits="false" dumpLineNumbers="None">

Tip: The whole point of this is to view your CSS, which you can do in the browser inspect tools or by just opening the file. When bundling is enabled that filename changes on every compile so I put the following at the top of my page so I can view my compiled CSS eaily in a new browser window every time it changes.

@if (Debugger.IsAttached) 
{
    <a href="@Styles.Url(ViewBag.CSS)" target="css">View CSS</a>
}

this will be a dynamic URL something like https://example.com/Content/css/bundlename?v=UGd0FjvFJz3ETxlNN9NVqNOeYMRrOkQAkYtB04KisCQ1

---

Update: I created a web.config transformation to set it to true for me during deployment / release build

  <bundleTransformer xmlns="http://tempuri.org/BundleTransformer.Configuration.xsd">
    <less xdt:Transform="Replace" useNativeMinification="true" ieCompat="true" strictMath="false" strictUnits="false" dumpLineNumbers="None">
      <jsEngine name="MsieJsEngine" />
    </less>
  </bundleTransformer>

Answer 4

You can turn off minification in your bundles simply by Clearing your transforms.

var scriptBundle = new ScriptBundle("~/bundles/scriptBundle");
...
scriptBundle.Transforms.Clear();

I personally found this useful when wanting to bundle all my scripts in a single file but needed readability during debugging phases.

Answer 5

This may become useful to someone in the future as the new framework, when setup through VS, gets a default web.config, web.Debug.config and web.Release.config. In the web.release.config you will find this line:

<compilation xdt:Transform="RemoveAttributes(debug)" />

this was seeming to override any inline changes I made. I commented this line out and we were gravy (in terms of seeing non-minified code in a "release" build)

Answer 6

If you have debug="true" in web.config and are using Scripts/Styles.Render to reference the bundles in your pages, that should turn off both bundling and minification. BundleTable.EnableOptimizations = false will always turn off both bundling and minification as well (irrespective of the debug true/false flag).

Are you perhaps not using the Scripts/Styles.Render helpers? If you are directly rendering references to the bundle via BundleTable.Bundles.ResolveBundleUrl() you will always get the minified/bundled content.