VS2013: Publish minified bundle created on files outside of the project

Question

I use Visual Studio 2013 and .NET 4.5 for an MVC project.

I've learning to use AngularJS via several videos on Pluralsight and one of them walks through the process of using Grunt to clean the output directory, then use ngmin to min-safe the Javascript files.

My process is using a gruntfile.js to clean and run ngmin against the javascript files in my solution, then put them in a directory called app_built. This is executed via a batch file in the pre-build for the project and then I include it via a ScriptBundle with IncludeDirectory pointing to the app_built directory. My intent is to use the Bundling features of .NET 4.5 to do the rest of the minification and concatenation of the Javascript after all the files have been min-safed via Grunt.

I specify the path to the min-safed files with the following:

bundles.Add(new ScriptBundle("~/bundles/minSafed")
  .IncludeDirectory("~/app_built/", "*.js", true));

If I run this on my local machine, it runs fine without a hitch. The Javascript is minified and bundled as I'd expect and the resulting web application runs fine as well.

If I publish the website to a remote server, I get a server error that the "Directory does not exist. Parameter name: directoryVirtualPath". I assume this error is saying that it's unable to find the directory populated with my many *.js files. I also assume this is because they weren't published since they aren't part of the solution, even though the folder they reside in is a part of the solution (it's just empty within the solution explorer in Visual Studio).

If my assumption is correct, what can I do to add these files to my solution so they'll be published with the rest of my web application with minimal effort on my end each time?

And if I'm incorrect in the assumption, what I can I do to resolve this otherwise?

Thanks!

Answer 1

I never did find a great way of going about this. I found information at http://sedodream.com/2010/05/01/WebDeploymentToolMSDeployBuildPackageIncludingExtraFilesOrExcludingSpecificFiles.aspx that seems related, but I was unable to make it work.

Rather, since I knew the name of the outputted file, I simply created such an empty file in my project and referenced that where I needed to. I then had the pre-build task replace the contents of that file with the externally minified version and it would be packaged with the project as necessary, so it works well enough.