dotnet publish CLI exclude .pdb

Question

In .NET 7, I do:

dotnet publish --self-contained --configuration Release --runtime win7-x64 --output myapp

How do I prevent .pdb files in the result? Ideally, just using the CLI?

Are there any additional steps I can take to decrease the result size?

Prickett

github.com/dotnet/sdk/issues/16975#issuecomment-597612660 – Anastassia

@LeiYang The successor to .NET 6? – Gilburt

sorry, i'm not aware of it. is .net advancing so fast? – Griffon

@LeiYang .NET 6 was released Nov 2021, .NET 5 was released Nov 2020, .NET Core 3.1 was released Dec 2019. It seems to be once a year. A prerelease in 2022 for .NET 7 seems to fit well into that timeline. – Gilburt

Does this answer your question? Disable generating PDB files in MsBuild – Flita

Note that if you are experiencing .pdb files and loads of other junk files in your publishing directory, you are probably suffering from [this issue][1] which is reported to Microsoft [here][2]. – Owing

Answer 1

According to this GitHub issue, there are two ways you can disable symbols.

You can either edit the .csproj file to add these two entries:

<DebugType>None</DebugType>
<DebugSymbols>False</DebugSymbols>

Or you can pass the following as part of the dotnet publish command:

/p:DebugType=None /p:DebugSymbols=false

For example:

dotnet publish /p:DebugType=None /p:DebugSymbols=false --self-contained --configuration Release --runtime win7-x64 --output myapp

Gilburt

I think, those properties are related to build, so they have no effect if you run dotnet publish --no-build – Breastplate

@Breastplate Yes, they are MSBuild options. You can also pass the same options to dotnet build I believe. – Gilburt

When I try this and I but this two lines in my .pubxml file I get this error: #77071559 – Amaris

Answer 2

To disable .pdb files only for release, add this to your Project.csproj:

<PropertyGroup Condition="'$(Configuration)'=='Release'">
  <DebugSymbols>False</DebugSymbols>
  <DebugType>None</DebugType>
</PropertyGroup>

Presbyter