Keep example.css and generate example.min.css

[philwareham]

Hi there,

Can't seem to find an answer to this (and might be a good one to show an example of in the README) - but how could I use OptimizeCssAssetsPlugin to keep the original (unminified) CSS generated by ExtractTextPlugin as a file (i.e. example.css) and then generate a minified file copy (i.e. example.min.css too?

Thanks for any help!

[NMFR]

Currently OptimizeCssAssetsPlugin transforms the original CSS asset and does not emit the original asset (basically it replaces the asset with the optimized version).

So it is not possible.
You can however run 2 parallel webpack builds, one with OptimizeCssAssetsPlugin and one without to get the 2 files.

Example webpack config:

module.exports = [
  {
    // webpack config without OptimizeCssAssetsPlugin to produce the original CSS file
  },
  {
    // webpack config with OptimizeCssAssetsPlugin to produce the optimized CSS file
  }
];

If you can expose your use case for this maybe we can check if it would be useful to add this feature to the plugin.

[philwareham]

Hi there, thanks for the reply. The reason I'd need two CSS files, one minified the other not, is that it is for a CSS library dist distribution where it is very useful for end users to have an unminified version of the CSS available for easier reference. Obviously for production they'd use the minified version.

[NMFR]

I think this is a bit of an edge case. I am closing the issue. I am not saying this will not be implemented but since it can be generated with a parallel webpack config i don't think its worth it to implement it right now.

[philwareham]

OK, thanks. Not sure it's edge case - it's fairly common practice to provide both minified and unminified resources in a distribution - bit agree this can be achieved by other means.