I Prefer Jim Developer James Schubert shares his code and his thoughts.

Makefile setup for minifying .js files in an expressjs application

There's not really any reason to uglify or minify your JavaScript files on a per-request basis or on a pre-cache basis. This should be done at deployment time only. This can be achieved by adding uglify-js to your package.json file.

// default package.js for an expressjs app using ejs and uglify-js
{
    "name": "application-name"
  , "version": "0.0.1"
  , "private": true
  , "dependencies": {
      "express": "2.4.6"
    , "ejs": ">=0.4.3"
    , "uglify-js": ">=1.1.0"
  }
}

Make sure the dependencies are installed with

npm install -d

Then, add the following make file and minify your JavaScripts as part of your make process!

JS = $(shell find public/javascripts/*.js)
MINIFY = $(JS:.js=.min.js)

all: clean $(MINIFY)

clean:
	rm -f ./public/javascripts/*.min.js

%.min.js: %.js
	node ./node_modules/uglify-js/bin/uglifyjs -o $@ $<

.PHONY: clean js minify

(expandable source is the same as the gist. It is doubled here to show in RSS feed readers.)

No related posts.