Is there some simple way to minify and concatenate bunch of JS files in the same folder + folders in the folder? I only want that, nothing else.
Tried HTML5 Boilerplate ant build script. It is way too complex for this job, though it works somehow. I couldn't figure out how to skip the images optimization part, even when specifying images.default.bypass value in project.properties.
So I need some script to run from a console, so it would minify and concatenate recursively all JS files it can find.
You could use the Microsoft solution http://ajaxmin.codeplex.com/
This can minify CSS and JS. It also has the 'wildcard' option.
Sounds like a job for a Makefile. Most recent versions of make have a built-in wildcard facility like you're asking for. Go with GNU make if you don't know anything about this tool, since its very widely available and well-known.
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It's quite sad I have to ask this question in April 2012, but I know quite few approaches to the problem.
So, I want a tool for statically compiling javascript files, resolving dependencies.
To be more precise I want such tool (let's call it sometool) which can do following:
scan a folder, find all *.js files
parse this files and find some very simple synchronous and 100% js-compliant directive. By synchronous I mean that there is no such thing like passing onload handler - it's only about static text preprocessing. By 100% js-compliant I mean that it looks it's looks like a comment from js point of view - something like // #include
resolve paths used in include directive, using some config which can be customized.
substitute all include with real output and put it into a separate folder.
I do realize that all this sounds obvious to most of you, but javascripters nowadays understand something slightly different while talking about dependency managing - see require.js, for example.
You should have a look at sprockets. It can bundle and pack JavaScript files and supports includes. You might have to write some boilerplate code though. There seems to be a script that allows sprocket to be run from command line bundled with it. And it's in Ruby. Don't know if this is a problem.
There actually is one answer, its name is: Apache ANT
ANT like Make, is a tool which can do almost any job for you. Concatenating files, stripping, reading files/foldes, minifiying, etc. etc. Instructions are done via .xml files, many jobs are already present but of course you can write your own jobs.
That way, you can have a perfect static build process. Personally I use it on severval bases. Have a look as example: https://github.com/jAndreas/typeof-NaN-2.0/tree/master/build
I'm not resolving javascript dependencies the way you described, but I do it with stylesheet dependencies there (replacing #import lines with actual files). So its a fairly easy task to do the same with javascript files. Also, last step in those build scripts are to copy the fresh generated files into my Apache website directory, its indeed one static build process and you're done.
Don't be scared about the filesize, I modified an existent config file from the HTML5 boiler plate there. I actually could shrink that file to 10% size, removing all optional builds.
I am not even sure if something like I want is possible, so I am asking you guys to just let me know if anyone did that before. So, my goal is to when I click on "Publish" website in VS2010, to have all javascript files compressed into one, same with css and then in my layout file change the references from all different js and css files to only those two merged ones. Is that doable? Or maybe it's doable but in more manual way?
Of course the goal here is to have only two calls to external files on the website, but when I develop I need to see all files so that I can actually work with it. I guess I could do it manually before each push, but I'd rather have it done automatically using some script or something. I didn't try anything yet, and I am not looking for ready solution, I am just looking to get to know the problem better and maybe some tips.
Thanks a lot!
This is built into ASP.net 4.5. But in the mean time, you should look at the following projects
YUI Compressor
The objective of this project is to compress any Javascript and Cascading Style Sheets to an efficient level that works exactly as the original source, before it was minified.
Cassette
Cassette automatically sorts, concatenates, minifies, caches and versions all your JavaScript, CoffeeScript, CSS, LESS and HTML templates.
RequestReduce
Super Simple Auto Spriting, Minification and Bundling solution
No need to tell RequestReduce where your resources are
Your CSS and Javascript can be anywhere - even on an external host
RequestReduce finds them at runtime automatically
SquishIt
SquishIt lets you squish some JavaScript and CSS. And also some LESS and CoffeeScript.
Combres
.NET library which enables minification, compression, combination, and caching of JavaScript and CSS resources for ASP.NET and ASP.NET MVC web applications. Simply put, it helps your applications rank better with YSlow and PageSpeed.
Chirpy
Mashes, minifies, and validates your javascript, stylesheet, and dotless files. Chirpy can also auto-update T4MVC and other T4 templates.
Scott Hanselman wrote a good overview blog post about this topic a while back.
I voted up the answer that mentioned Cassette but I'll detail that particular choice a little more. Cassette is pretty configurable, but under the most common option, it allows you to reference CSS and Javascript resources through syntax like this:
Bundles.Reference("Scripts/aFolderOfScriptsThatNeedsToLoadFirst", "first");
Bundles.Reference("Scripts/aFolderOfScripts");
Bundles.Reference("Styles/aFolderOfStyles");
You would then render these in your master or layout pages like this:
#Bundles.RenderStylesheets()
#Bundles.RenderScripts("first")
#Bundles.RenderScripts()
During development, your scripts and styles will be included as individual files, and Cassette will try to help you out by detecting changes and trying to make the browser reload those files. This approach is great for debugging into libraries like knockout when they're doing something you don't expect. And, the best part, when you launch the site, you just change the web.config and Cassette will minify and bundle all your files into as few bundles as possible.
You can find more detail in their documentation (which is pretty good though sometimes lags behind development): http://getcassette.net/documentation/getting-started
Have a look at YUI compressor # codeplex.com this could be really helpful.
What I have done before is setup a post-build event, have it run a simple batch file which minimizes your source files. Then if you're in release mode (not in debug mode), you would reference the minimized source files. http://www.west-wind.com/weblog/posts/2007/Jan/19/Detecting-ASPNET-Debug-mode
I haven't heard about publish minification. I think use should choose between dynamical minification like SquishIt or compile time like YuiCompressor or AjaxMinifier.
I prefer compile time. I don't think it's very critical to have to compile time changing files. If you have huge css/js code lines you can choose this action only for release compilation and if it helps publish this files only in needed build cinfigurations.
I don't know if there is any possible way to somehow hook into the functionality from that 'Publish' button/whatever it is, but it's surely possible to have that kind of 'static build process'.
Personally I'm using Apache ANT to script exactly what you've described there. So you're developing on your uncompressed js/html/css files and when you're done, you call like ant build which then minifies, compresses, stripes and publishes your whole web application.
Example script: https://github.com/jAndreas/typeof-NaN-2.0/blob/master/build/build.xml
The documentation for tinymce notes that one can compress all the javascript and components (which I assume includes plugins) into a single file. They do note reasons why one might not want to that as well.
Compressing into a static file
It's also possible to simply concatenate the necessary components and some boilerplate code into a single .js file. However you will always have to recreate this file if you want to use other TinyMCE plugins, or you upgrade TinyMCE. You will also probably want to configure your webserver to compress javascript files.
But assuming one actually did want to do it, how does one actually go about it? Build.xml does does not provide an appropriate task it seems. At least when I tried it the plugins did not seem to be included when I loaded tiny_mce.js.
There are some really excellent command line tools for this, but you can also do this easily with just a text editor. The simplest way is to just open each file, copy the contents, and paste the contents into a single JS file ("everything-all-together.js", say). You'll need to make sure you paste the files into the single file in the same order you would've put the script tags into the HTML doc. Once you have all the files all together, you can use tools like JSXMin, YUI Compressor, or Google Closure. There are also some tools online that do this, like http://www.minifyjavascript.com/. You can paste in the uncompressed JS and copy back out the compressed JS. This makes the build process really cumbersome, but if you just need to do this once, that will get you there.
The best way to do this is to do it as a build step for the site. That means when you make changes to the JS files, you rebuild the compressed JS file to include the changes as well. This can be a cumbersome step if you're iterating quickly and changing files over and over again. You don't want to have to rebuild the compressed file with each save. You can solve this by setting up development and production modes of the site. When being loaded in development mode, the JS files aren't grouped together. When all the necessary changes are made, you'd rerun the build step to generate the single compressed JS file. To do the minification from the command line, you'd probably want to use Google Closure: https://developers.google.com/closure/compiler/. If you download the compiler app, you can do the following:
java -jar compiler.jar some-file.js some-other-file.js > compiled.js
That will generate a file called compiled.js that includes the contents of some-file.js and some-other-file.js in a minified format. You can specify as many files to compile as you need to. Actually, I'm selling Closure a bit short to say it's just minified. It's also extremely optimized code. Pretty much every site should be doing this to all of there JS all the time unless they're already doing something better.
I hope I'm getting you (and the tinymce docs) right, but this sounds a lot like combining JavaScript files on the server side. This means taking the contents of all of your JS files, putting them into one file and returning that one to the client.
Why would you do that? Well, this should be obvious, but.. you reduce the number of HTTP requests to your server, which is always a good thing.
How do you do that? There are many solutions out there for all server-side languages and frameworks, I suggest doing a Google search for "[your language] javascript minifier" or something similar.
Hope this helps.
I've developing JavaScript since many years but have never really thought about the whole testing, developing and building stuff - but I realized it's pretty much necessary. We've just used a Subversion repository with simple release tagging (switching to git soon). As a new bigger pure JavaScript project (using jQuery) is arriving soon, I'd like to optimize the whole process.
I already did some research but never found a good starting tutorial.
It's definetly a good idea to split classes and separate code blocks into several js-files and not a big one (as Prototype or jQuery do it). These js-files must be "build" into a single file. How do I achieve that?
It's pretty much necessary to Unit-test the stuff me and my colleagues are coding. I found the js-test-driver which has an eclipse plugin that seems to be doing his job quite good. If my developer-folder contains all these src- and src-test-files, how do I integrate this in the building process?
For testing, take a look at this: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/32809/javascript-unit-testing
For merging all of your JavaScript into one file you can use something like YUI Compressor. You need to be looking for a minimizer first, compression second. A minimizer just takes the files and merges them together and gets rid of whitespace. A compressor will actually try to optimize the js for you by changing variable names and removing unnecessary code.
As for unit testing I am unsure of how you will want to do that. There are a few unit test libraries out there. A popular tool for testing is Selenium. I don't currently do unit testing so I am out of my element there..
For setting up your code you could always look at using a JavaScript framework like ExtJS or JavaScriptMVC. Those help you with setting up your code in the proper way and also helps focus your team on the proper standards and coding structure while also writing a lot of the code for you so you don't have to re-invent the wheel.
EDIT: Just a quick after thought. Even if you don't want to use a JavaScript framework, I would suggest checking them out, especially ExtJS, just to see how they organize their code and some of the tricks they do to keep it clean.
I'll answer part of your question:
These js-files must be "build" into a
single file.
This is possible only with server side language - in ASP.NET you have built in tools for that, otherwise build your own "merger" server side file and reference that file instead of the actual .js files.
These js-files must be "build" into a single file. How do I achieve that?
Definitely keep your files separate in version control, and only merge them during the build process.
The YUI compressor mentioned elsewhere is a java-based tool that will not only merge but -- of course! -- compress your files for faster download.
If you just want a simple merge of files, a simple Perl or bash-script (or other preferred scripting language) could concatenate multiple .js files into one for release -- just make sure that the build script also updates all HTML in the release to reference only the single page.
Multiple sites reference combining JavaScript and CSS files to improve web page performance, including examples of using ANT build scripts to concatenate the files prior to deployment.
I've search, and haven't found any information how to automate updating references to those files in HTML and other documents. I am looking to avoid hacking together something error prone, and want to learn from others who have automated builds in the past.
Are there automated tools in the wild to complete this task that I'm not seeing? Are there recommended processes to update the script and link tags in HTML? Can these solutions be integrated with ANT or similar build tools?
There sure is and it's a smart thing to do.
I found a PHP solution, don't know it that's okay for you, but if it isn't you can still read it's source (it's not difficult) and learn a lot. The solution works like this:
Rewrite your requests like this: from css/main.css and css/skin.css to css/main.css,skin.css (of course you can put many more).
Use apache's mod_rewrite to redirect this request to a script (in our case combine.php), that will combine all files to a single one.
The script combines all the files and sends the combined file. Then it saves it to a cache folder.
Next time around it checks if there is an up-to-date version of the cache and serves that one. If the latest file modification time has changed, it discards the cache.
The solution works great and it even makes use of HTTP cache headers and spits out an [ETags], which you should do anyway.
You are correct this is a great way to speed up page loading. It will even work in conjunction with a CDN, which the other poster recommended.
Here is a small script that will pack multiple files in to one for deployment. It supports both JS and CSS, and will even "minify" them by removing whitespace, etc. Just hook this in to your build and deploy scripts.
juicer: http://cjohansen.no/en/ruby/juicer_a_css_and_javascript_packaging_tool
What even better, it will follow JS and CSS import statements, so you only need to point your HTML files to the loader file and it will work in both development and production. (Assuming you replace the loader file with the combined file on deployment.)
There are others, including some run-time solutions. But it sounds like you have a build process in place anyway.
As far as HTML updating, if you still need it, since automated deployments are very popular in the Ruby world, and you may find some standalone utilities to help even for non-ruby projects. (As above) Methinks this would be best handled by your own project's template language, though. (With a static resource revision id, or such.)
Good luck, and let us know what you find.
I think what you really want is a CDN Content Delivery Network.
Read about it here
http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_delivery_network