Minifyify

Tiny, Debuggable Browserify Bundles

WARNING: Unmaintained!

I have stopped writing Javascript full-time, and therefore do not use Minifyify anymore. While I will continue to accept pull requests and keep the test suite running, you should consider better-maintained alternatives, such as uglifyify. Thank you for your support!

Why use Minifyify?

Before, browserify made you choose between sane debugging and sane load times. Now, you can have both.

Minifyify is a browserify plugin that minifies your code. The magic? The sourcemap points back to the original, separate source files.

Now you can deploy a minified bundle in production, and still have meaningful stack traces when things inevitably break!

Advantages

There are advantages to using minifyify over your current minification solution:

• Reliability

If you are currently using uglifyify and realized that your sourcemap is behaving strangely, you're not alone. Minifyify builds its own sourcemap instead of depending on uglify-js's insourcemap option, and has proven to be more reliable in practice.

• Smaller Bundles

If you are currently running uglify-js on the bundle browserify outputs, minifyify can give you a smaller bundle because it removes dead code before browserify processes requires in it.

For example:

if(process.env.browser) {
  var realtime = require('socket-io.client')
}
else {
  var realtime = require('socket-io')
}

Only one of the required modules will be in your output bundle, because minifyify runs uglify on each individual file before browserify does its bundling.

• A Neater Web Inspector

Minifyify allows you to transform those obnoxious absolute paths in your web inspector with compressPath.

• CoffeeScript Support

~~Minifyify is tested against CoffeeScript, and can map minified code all the way back to the original .coffee files.~~

CoffeeScript support is janky because of this issue. The sourcemap that coffee-script produces is wrong, so I had to skip over minifyify's CoffeeScript test. minifyify won't crash, but the test suite validates sourcemaps for correctness. Use at your own risk!

Usage

Programmatic API

var browserify = require('browserify')
    // As of browserify 5, you must enable debug mode in the constructor to use minifyify
  , bundler = new browserify({debug: true});

bundler.add('entry.js');

bundler.plugin('minifyify', {map: 'bundle.js.map'});

bundler.bundle(function (err, src, map) {
  // Your code here
});

The map option should be the location of the sourcemap on your server, and is used to insert the sourceMappingURL comment in src.

Command Line

$ browserify entry.js -d -p [minifyify --map bundle.js.map --output bundle.js.map] > bundle.js

The --output option is a required option on the command line interface and specifies where minifyify should write the sourcemap to on disk.

Passing options to uglify-js is as easy as passing extra parameters in as an uglify object.

$ browserify entry.js -d -p [minifyify --map bundle.js.map --output bundle.js.map --uglify [ --compress [ --dead_code--comparisons 0 ] ] ] > bundle.js

In the example above, if you want to invoke minifyify to only minify without generating any source maps or references to it (which is done by setting [options.map] to false programatically), you can pass --no-map instead of --map and --output, like this:

$ browserify entry.js -d -p [minifyify --no-map] > bundle.js

Options

[options.compressPath]

Shorten the paths you see in the web inspector by defining a compression function.

// A typical compressPath function
compressPath: function (p) {
  return path.relative('my-app-root', p);
}

If a string is provided, it will be used instead of my-app-root in the function above. This is useful if you are working from the command line and cannot define a function.

Defaults to a no-op (absolute paths to all source files).

[options.map]

This is added to the bottom of the minified source file, and should point to where the map will be accessible from on your server. More details here.

Example: If your bundle is at mysite.com/bundle.js and the map is at mysite.com/map.js, set options.map = '/map.js'

Set to false to minify, but not produce a source map or append the source map URL comment.

[options.minify]

Set to false to disable minification and source map transforms. This essentially turns minifyify into a pass-thru stream.

If you set it to an object, it will be passed as the options argument to uglify.minify.

[options.output]

Specify a path to write the sourcemap to. Required when using the CLI, optional when working programmatically.

[options.uglify]

Will be passed to uglify.minify

[options.include]

Pattern(s) matching the files you want included. Defaults to '**/*' (include everything). null/undefined, a single string, and an array of strings are all acceptable values. You have the full range of glob patterns available to you, so you can do app/{moduleA,moduleB}/*.js, etc.

[options.exclude]

Pattern(s) matching the files you want excluded. By default nothing is excluded. Like include; null, a string, and an array of strings are all acceptable. Exclude always wins over include. If a file matches both the include and exclude pattern arrays, it will be excluded.

[options.base]

By default all glob strings are matched against relative paths from process.cwd() (your projects base directory). This option allows you to changed that. base:'subDirA' means evaluate globs relative from that sub directory. base:'/' means test your glob pattern against absolute file paths.

FAQ

• PARSE ERROR!

  Are you using brfs? Pin it to version 1.0.2. See issue #44 for details.

• Wait.. Why did the total size (source code + map) get BIGGER??

  It's not immediately obvious, but the more you minify code, the bigger the sourcemap gets. Browserify can get away with merely mapping lines to lines because it is going from uncompressed code to uncompressed code. Minifyify squishes multiple lines together, so the sourcemap has to carry more information.

  This is OK because the sourcemap is in a separate file, which means your app will be snappy for your users as their browsers won't download the sourcemap.

• How does this work?

  Minifyify runs UglifyJS on each file in your bundle, and transforms browserify's sourcemap to map to the original files.

• Why does the sourcemap cause my debugger to behave erratically?

  Some of the optimizations UglifyJS performs will result in sourcemaps that appear to broken. For example, when UglifyJS uses the comma operator to shorten statements on different lines, a single debugger "step" in minified code may execute multiple lines of the original source.

  Another common example of erratic behavior is when code like this is compressed:

  var myThing = myFunc('a')
    , cantGetHere = myFunc('b');

  If you set a breakpoint on the second line, your debugger might not pause execution there. I've found that setting the breakpoint on the first line and stepping onto the second line is more reliable.

Other Modules

minifyify not working for you? try gulp-sourcemaps.

License

The MIT License (MIT)

Copyright (c) 2013-2014 Ben Ng

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.