CODEWITHSUNDEEP
asp.net-mvcbundling-and-minification
user1044169
user1044169

Reputation: 2866

Looking for an advise on bundling of JS

I have an MVC 4.5 project that has most of the UI logic organized in jQuery plugins. I want to protect my code by minification and bundling (While I understand that minification will only do so much as far as protection, it's better than leaving formatted and documented source files on the server.)

Ideally, I want my dev server to work as is -- files are non-minified and separated. But, when I deploy to the production server, I want the source files to be removed and only minified bundles to be available. Also note, on many occasions my jQuery plugins load other plugins from JavaScript code (I use head.js), so I cannot use @Script.Render for that.

What technologies do I use -- built-in MVC bundling, SquishIt, Bundler or do I need to resort to MSBuild and Microsoft Axaj Minifier? To recap, I want to remove source JS files and just be left with minified bundles in production, and, preferably, find a way to not change head.js references based on whether files are minified or not.

Thanks for your advice.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 201

Answers (1)

user1044169
user1044169

Reputation: 2866

Just thought I respond with what I ended up doing here:

To recap: I wanted to obfuscate my source files with minification while not exposing the source JS files in production. I also wanted for head.js to resolve source file URLs to bundle URLs:

  • Put all non-minified javascript files in a folder viewable only to Admin role
  • Used bundling built-in to ASP.NET MVC 4.5 to generate bundles
  • Pointed my head.js tag to an MVC controller that returned head.js code + a javascript array with an x-ref between raw URLs and bundle URLs (available from BundleTable static object)

Bundling occurs outside of ASP.NET membership, so bundles are generated and available to anonymous users even though the source files are in the folder only accessible by Admin. Then, the trick of dynamically augmenting head.js code with server-side generated bundle URLs takes care of calling bundles from JS files.

Upvotes: 1

Related Questions