Pasted

Text files, baked into the binary.

A source generator that turns text files into string constants at compile time, for source generators and AOT binaries that have no assembly directory to read from at runtime.

🏃 Getting Started | 📚 Documentation

Why?

Pasted is a .NET source generator that embeds the contents of a text file into C# source at compile time. It is useful for resources such as HTML, CSS and JavaScript that would otherwise be read from disk at runtime. It works well for source generators and applications that are compiled ahead of time (AOT).

How to use

Add the embedded files to your project, for example:

<ItemGroup>
    <AdditionalFiles Include="wwwroot\index.html" />
    <AdditionalFiles Include="wwwroot\css\site.css" />
    <AdditionalFiles Include="wwwroot\js\site.js" />
</ItemGroup>

Then in an .editorconfig file add the following property,

[wwwroot/index.html]
embed = true

[wwwroot/css/site.css]
embed = true

[wwwroot/js/site.js]
embed = true

Then finally add the Pasted source generator to your project:

<ItemGroup>
    <PackageReference Include="Pasted" Version="x.x.x">
        <PrivateAssets>all</PrivateAssets>
        <IncludeAssets>runtime; build; native; contentfiles; analyzers; buildtransitive</IncludeAssets>
    </PackageReference>
</ItemGroup>

The source generator will then generate a static class with constants for each file, which you can use in your code:

// the EmbeddedFiles static class is generated by the source generator
const string html = EmbeddedFiles.Index;
const string css = EmbeddedFiles.Css;
const string js = EmbeddedFiles.Js;

The namespace, class name, and constant field names can be configured in the .editorconfig file.

Configuration Options

Option	Type	Default	Description
embed	boolean	false	Enables embedding this file into the generated class. Files with embed = true will be included.
namespace	string	Pasted	Overrides the namespace used for the generated static class.
class_name	string	EmbeddedFiles	Overrides the name of the generated static class that contains file constants.
name	string	Derived from file name (sans extension)	Overrides the constant field name for the file; by default uses the file name without extension.
public	boolean	false	Controls visibility of generated class and its fields; true makes them public, else internal.