Offer unminified assets for debugging

During my study of WordPress plugins, I came across SearchWP Live Ajax Search. It contains short code that made me happy and I think every WordPress plugin should implement it. The code is very simple, but it does what I need. It offers plugin scripts in unminified version for debuging.

Of course, plugins should load minified versions of all assets, but if you want to debug them, it’s a pain 🙂 I can’t even count how many times I’ve tested a minified version of javascript, and this approach would make things immensely easier for me.

How to do this?

Just add this small check to you code and then use $debug as suffix in script registration.

$debug = (defined( 'SCRIPT_DEBUG' ) && (true === SCRIPT_DEBUG)) || 
(isset( $_GET['script_debug'])) ? '' : '.min';

wp_register_script(
    'custom-script', ASSETS_URL . "javascript/script{$debug}.js",
    [ 'jquery' ],
    ASSETS_VERSION,
    true
);

If you define SCRIPT_DEBUG or pass script_debug as parameter in URL, it loads that script unminified.

What you think about this approach?