Minify dynamically generated JavaScript at runtime for ASP.NET Core

Question

In ASP.NET MVC 5 you would achieve this by:

public ActionResult DynamicJs()
{
  // dynamically generated
  string javaScript = new Minifier().MinifyJavaScript("alert('Hello world!');");

  // returns minified javaScript
  return JavaScript(javaScript);
}

The Minifier class was a member of Microsoft.Ajax.Utilities, which you would get from the WebGrease Nuget package.

However, in ASP.NET Core this package is not available for .NET Core and many are using the BundlerMinifier.Core package by Mads Kristensen for minification. https://www.nuget.org/packages/BundlerMinifier.Core/3.2.449

How can I achieve the same result in ASP.NET Core?

Answer 1

NUglify is the underlying dependency for BundlerMinifier.Core that does all the heavy lifting.

You can use it to achieve the same result.

//dynamically generated
string javaScript = "alert('Hello world!');";

//set ContentType as the JavaScript() object is not available in .NET Core
ContentResult result = new ContentResult
{
  ContentType = "application/javascript", 
  Content = NUglify.Uglify.Js(javaScript).Code
};
        
return result;

Uglify also has methods for CSS and HTML.