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?

https://github.com/dotnet/sdk/issues/16975#issuecomment-597612660 — stuartd, Mar 15 '22 at 02:27
@LeiYang [The successor to .NET 6?](https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/announcing-net-7-preview-1/) — ProgrammingLlama, Mar 15 '22 at 02:37
@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. — ProgrammingLlama, Mar 15 '22 at 02:39
Does this answer your question? [Disable generating PDB files in MsBuild](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/773796/disable-generating-pdb-files-in-msbuild) — gunr2171, Mar 15 '22 at 03:16
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]. — Hugh W, Jan 16 '23 at 12:05

score 17 · Accepted Answer · answered Mar 15 '22 at 03:50

17

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

answered Mar 15 '22 at 03:50

ProgrammingLlama

I think, those properties are related to **build**, so they have no effect if you run **dotnet publish --no-build** – Ilyan Jun 09 '22 at 14:29
@Ilyan Yes, they are MSBuild options. You can also pass the same options to `dotnet build` I believe. – ProgrammingLlama Jun 09 '22 at 15:44

score 13 · Answer 2 · answered May 31 '22 at 13:54

13

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

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

answered May 31 '22 at 13:54

lonix

2 Answers2