minifier

A simple tool for minifying CSS/JS without a big setup.

Feature highlights

It minifies JS and CSS
It reworks URLs in CSS from the original location to the output location.
It automatically resolves @import statements in CSS.

How to install

There are two ways to install it:

npm install minifier
Cloning directly from github.

None of them links to binaries automatically, so that is currently a manual operation. This will be solved in the near future, though.

How to run from a command-line

Running it is simple:

minify [--output path/to/put/file] path/to/file

If the output parameter is not set, it will place a file next to the original, with the suffix .min.

For example, minifier script.js will output script.min.js, whereas minifier --output out.js script.js will output out.js.

A folder can also be targeted. When that is done, it will minify all css and js file in that folder.

In that case, --output does not make much sense, as all files will be minified to the same. If the name still requires a specific pattern such as a timestamp, --template is the option for you.

There are various options available:

{{filename}} is the original filename.
{{ext}} is the extension.
{{sha}} is a sha-digest of the unminified file contents.
{{md5}} is a md5-digest of the unminified file contents.

For example, {{filename}}-{{md5}}.min.{{ext}} will make abc.js into something like abc-f90731d65c61af25b149658a120d26cf.min.js.

To avoid the minification of previously minified files, there is a --clean option, which will delete all files that match the output pattern.

This also means that any real files that match the pattern will be removed as well, so please be careful.

Running from a node-script

It is also possible to run the minifier from within another node script:

var minifier = require('minifier')
  , input = '/some/path'

minifier.on('error', function(err) {
	// handle any potential error
})
minifier.minify(input, options)

As with the command-line variant, the input should be a path to either a javascript file, a css file or a directory.

The options-dictionary takes the same parameters as the command-line variant:

output: A path-string that tells where to put the output.
template: A string template for how to build the outputted filenames.
clean: A bool for whether other files with names similar to the template should be deleted before minifying the contents of a directory.

Running the tests

After installing from github, simply run npm test.

Alternatively, the runAllTests.js script will also execute the tests.

There is also a script called prepareManualTests.js, which will run the script against the css-files inside test/manual/css/ and provides a real-world example of the CSS minification tools.

The manual tests can be seen by opening test/manual/index.html in a browser after executing prepareManualTests.js.

Credits

In no particular order:

duckduckgo for the image used by the manual tests.
sqwish for minifying CSS files.
uglify-js for minifying JS files.
commander for command-line interaction.
mocha, chai, sinon and sinon-chai for testing home-brewed logic.
glob-whatev for trawling through the file-system when targetting a folder.
hogan.js for parsing the template string.

murb / minifier