How does bundleExclude work?

[MrWolfZ]

I am trying to exclude some files from deployment when deploying my ASP 5 app to azure (building it with CTP 6). I have a folder called "dev" inside my wwwroot. In my project.json, I have added

"bundleExclude": [
        "node_modules",
        "bower_components",
        "wwwroot/dev/**/*.*",
        "dev/**/*.*",
        "**.kproj",
        "**.user",
        "**.vspscc",
        "**.js"
    ],

However, this does not seem to do anything. During publish I can see that the command "kpm bundle" is run. When I run that command myself it always copies over everything in my wwwroot into the output folder, so it ignores the bundleExclude setting completely.

I am using kre-clr-win-x86.1.0.0-beta3 with kpm being at version 1.0.0-beta3-11030.

What is the correct way of using bundleExclude?

[Eilon]

There's a bit of info here: https://github.com/aspnet/Home/wiki/Project.json-file

@troydai can you help out here?

[MrWolfZ]

Yeah, I read through the wiki article for the project.json file and it seems I am doing everything right. I am also aware that in beta2 the property was called packExclude and will be called publishExclude in beta4. Just for thoroughness' sake I have tried all those as well, and none seem to work :(

[troydai]

@MrWolfZ I'm here to help :)

So there are a few things to begin with:

1. Can you try the latest DNX (beta4 or beta5) since I notice you mentioned you're using beta3. You can find the instructions here https://github.com/aspnet/home.
2. The search paths are case sensitive, can you double check the patterns?
3. It is easy to miss, can you clear the output folder first and then try publish the web site again?
4. If it is okay, why not share your project as a sample with me, I would love to take a look.

[MrWolfZ]

@troydai Thanks ;)

To your points:

1. I have upgraded the old KLR to beta 4 and DNX to beta5. Tried the publishing with both, and still no luck :(
2. The patterns are correct. As you may notice I have even added the pattern "**.js" in there for test purposes, which should ignore all javascript files, but it doesn't.
3. With kpm there was the option --overwrite which would clear the output folder and I used that. With beta5 dnu publish does not have that option. However, I have tried cleaning the output folder manually, and republishing. I still get the files which should be ignored.
4. Sure, you can find the project at https://github.com/MrWolfZ/eSportsDirectory/tree/asp5. In the root folder there you can see a file called publish.bat which is what I am using to publish the app. You can also see that I have packExclude, bundleExclude, and publishExclude in the project.json file in the src folder. Lastly, if you try to run the app (which I don't think you'll need to, but hey, who knows :D), it will fail due to a missing config file. On startup the app tries to read the config.user.ini and connect to my Azure DocumentDB. That config file and the connection information for the DB is not in the repository, and I didn't yet have time to implement an in-memory mock for the DB. You can however create an empty config.user.ini file and comment out the line 120 from Startup.cs and it should start.

Thanks for looking into this.

[troydai]

Hi @MrWolfZ ,

I took a look at your sample and tried dnu publish --out (DNX 1.0.0-beta5-11611), the result looks good to me. More specifically (just in case we have different understanding on how dnu publish should work.)

1. The content in wwwroot folder are copied to target wwwroot folder.
2. The other sources are copied to approot folder. Files excluded in project.json do not present there.

I failed to run dnu publish --no-source because the project doesn't build (could be the problem?).

[MrWolfZ]

Hi @troydai ,

My issue is with point 1. I have a folder called dev inside wwwroot which I do not want to be copied over into the output wwwroot folder. From what you are saying it seems that the exclusions in publishExclude only apply to what is copied into approot.

To expand a bit on what I am trying to achieve: I want to have my development files for the webapp inside the wwwroot for development, so that I can just run the app from within visual studio and get unminified files etc. Then, I have a gulp task that packages the app into another folder called dist inside wwwroot. Now, when I publish the site to Azure, I want only the dist folder to be copied onto the site, but not the dev folder. I read on some sites, that the idea is to never have any source files in wwwroot, but instead have a task run before or after build to copy over the files into wwwroot and then run the app. However, I feel that this is just too much work, and makes it harder to test changes immediately. With the setup that I have I can simply edit the file I want to change (be it js, css, or html) and just F5 the browser to get the update, without the need to have some watch task run via gulp that notices changes and copies files into wwwroot.

TL;DR I feel we should be able to have source files in wwwroot with the option to exclude them from deployment.

PS: The project should build. dnu publish --no-source works for me. Maybe I forgot to check in some file. What was the error that you got?

[troydai]

@MrWolfZ I got your point. In order to separate the content in wwwroot from the source codes, what you can do is to create a separate wwwroot folder and use one of the following approaches to publish:

1. Add parameter to dnu publish command to specify from where the wwwroot output is. For example:
   dnu publish --out <output path> --wwwroot <source wwwroot> --wwwroot-out <destination wwwroot>
2. In the project.json specify the webroot folder. Example: https://github.com/aspnet/MusicStore/blob/master/src/MusicStore/project.json#L13

You can take a look my sample here: https://github.com/troydai/aspnet.beta4.kudu

You comments on the second part is interesting. I'll bring in our PM /cc @glennc .

[MrWolfZ]

@troydai Thanks a lot, this is exactly what I needed. I can simply dnu publish --wwwroot "wwwroot/dist" and it will only publish the minified etc. files.

However, I can't achieve this in Visual Studio yet, since it does not allow to specify a different source wwwroot during publish but instead will simply publish everything in the configured webroot. Maybe this could be added as a feature in CTP 7/8.

To expand on my point from the last post, another advantage of having development source files as well as distribution files in the same wwwroot is, that I can then just boot up the server and quickly smoke test my app with both versions to check e.g. whether I missed a script or style sheet reference in my distribution build process for the frontend. Of course this mainly applies to the scenario where one is using client side frameworks like AngularJS, and not as much to the standard MVC model.

[ninety7]

@troydai It seems that publishExclude is not working for me deploying a simple ASP.NET 5 app to azure using VS 2015 RC. Maybe it's a bug?

[troydai]

@ninety7 can you let me know your scenario and what exactly doesn't work for you?

[ninety7]

I created an ASP.NET 5 site using VS 2015 RC, published it to Azure Web Sites, and both the temp publish folder and the publish logs add files from the bower_components and node_modules folders.
This is my publishExclude configuration on project.json:

"publishExclude": [
        "node_modules",
        "bower_components",
        "**.xproj",
        "**.user",
        "**.vspscc"
    ]

It excludes *.xproj, *.user, and **.vspscc files, but not folders. I wonder if there's a different pattern I should be using to exclude folders...?

[troydai]

Do you publish through Kudu or Web Deploy?

[ninety7]

I see msdeploy command on VS 2015 RC

[troydai]

@ninety7 Thank you. I'll take a look at this with tooling guys. I'll get back to you later.

[troydai]

/cc @sayedihashimi regarding to Web Deploy scenario.

@ninety7 files in these folders show up in the log doesn't necessary mean they're copied to remote site. You sure that's what happened? Can you paste the log?