Can I run ionic serve with a minified build?

I am am starting to struggle on how to diagnose a startup issue I have when running a production build on Android as reported in this post.

I have not tried the production build on any other platform yet, so not sure if I am going to have the same problem on iOS and in a UWP, but thought perhaps if I could run a minified build via ionic serve , or some other way, so I can run it within Chrome on my desktop perhaps I might get some hint of the error in the dev console. I am just guessing that maybe it’s the minification that is causing the problem, as I only get it when using the --prod flag (using just --release without the --prod I do not get the issue.

I’ve had a look at build scripts topic, but can’t quite see how to do what I am after.

Any ideas on how to run a minified version of the application on my desktop Chrome would be hugely appreciated, as I am running out of ideas on how to get to the bottom of this.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions!

The very first reply to your other topic explained exactly how to debug on a device by attaching Chrome’s developer tools to it. That seems like a much better option to me.

Ok, I finally found what to do. It is just a simple command line flag --prod is picked up when I do the run command

ionic serve --prod does not work, but using the device and chrome tools I can run

ionic run android --prod

… and now I can the error in the dev tools , which is…

   		 Uncaught Error: Cannot find module "./app.module.ngfactory"
		at Object.<anonymous> (main.js:7)
		at e (main.js:1)
		at main.js:1
		at main.js:1

This now probably belongs in my original post so I will continue it there.

The combination --prod and --release did the thing for me:
npm run ionic:build --prod --release