BundlerMinifierCore files are not copied on dotnet publish - css

Question

I had an ASP.NET Core 1.1 application, which was upgraded from Visual Studio 2015 using project.json to Visual Studio 2017 with the MsBuild csproj standard. The app is deployed to a docker container on linux, where the official images from microsoft are used. BundlerMinifier were missing. But only on docker, not in Visual Studio 2017 and not using dotnet publish on Windows 10.
I found out, that the bundles were generated. But in the wwwroot folder of the solution, not in the publish output folder (passed by --output to dotnet publish). Lets say, I have /app where my VS solution is located in the docker container. Now I run dotnet publish --output /app/output. My bundled files are now in /app/src/{projectName}/wwwroot instead of /app/output/wwwroot where I need them.
I use relative paths in the bundleconfig.json like this:
[
{
"minify": { "enabled": false },
"outputFileName": "wwwroot/site.min.css",
"inputFiles": [
"wwwroot/lib/my-input-file.css"
]
}
]
To create the bundle, I have the following publishing scripts in my csproj file
<Target Name="PrepublishScript" BeforeTargets="PrepareForPublish">
<Exec Command="bower install" />
<Exec Command="dotnet bundle" />
</Target>
I'm not very familar with MsBuild. But according to some researchs, the following lines seems responsible to copy files to the output directory (like wwwroot)
<ItemGroup>
<None Update="wwwroot\**\*;Views\**\*.cshtml;Areas\**\*.cshtml">
<CopyToPublishDirectory>PreserveNewest</CopyToPublishDirectory>
</None>
</ItemGroup>
Since wwwroot is already included here and the copying of other files like Views works, I thought there is an issue about execution ordner. Something like MsBuild copy the files before MsBuild is publishing them. But this seems not possible from the logic, since this is done before PrepareForPublish target, which is - according to Microsoft docs - the right way.

Answer 1

That's because you don't include the files in the wwwroot.
<ItemGroup>
<None Update="wwwroot\**\*;Views\**\*.cshtml;Areas\**\*.cshtml">
<CopyToPublishDirectory>PreserveNewest</CopyToPublishDirectory>
</None>
</ItemGroup>
wwwroot\**\* will only copy over the files in subfolders of wwwroot (at least this was still the case with the old project.json structure), but your css file is in wwwroot/site.min.css. So either move them to wwwroot/css/site.min.css. Or easier: Just publish the copy over the whole wwwroot folder (and keep your libs files outside of wwwroot, like in bower_modules or npm_modules):
Also I'm not sure of <None> is the right tag for it. In my project's csproj there is only <None Include="App.config" /> and the files I copy over are in <Content>, like below
<ItemGroup>
<None Include="App.config" />
<Content Update="wwwroot;Views;Areas;appsettings.json;web.config">
<CopyToPublishDirectory>PreserveNewest</CopyToPublishDirectory>
</Content>
</ItemGroup>
As you shouldn't have any unrelated files in Views and Areas it's easier to copy over the whole folders too.