Cordova hook that allows you to uglify or minify your apps JavaScript and CSS. It is using UglifyJS2 for JavaScript compression and clean-css to minify CSS.
Install the following package below inside of your apps root folder.
npm install cordova-uglify --save-dev
After install an after_prepare folder will be added to your hooks folder with the uglify.js script in it. A JSON config file (uglify-config.json) for the script will be added to the hooks folder. The hook will automatically be given executable permission.
Once you have this hook installed it will compress your apps JavaScript and CSS when you run a cordova prepare <platform> or cordova build <platform> command. This hook does not change your assets that live in the root www folder; it will uglify the assets that get output to the platforms folder after a prepare or build. By default the hook will uglify the JavaScript and minify CSS files by recursively searching the folders provided in the foldersToProcess in the uglify-config.json (relative to your project root directory). You can disable the recursive search by setting the recursiveFolderSearch to false in the JSON config file. If you want to process files only when building/preparing for release include --release in your CLI command like this - cordova prepare ios --release. Please see the note below about usage with Ionic 2.
*Important Note - If you are using ES6+ in your cordova project make sure it is transpiled to ES5 before using this hook.
{
"alwaysRun": false, // set to true to always uglify files
"recursiveFolderSearch": true, // process all JS and CSS files found in foldersToProcess
"foldersToProcess": [ // when recursiveFolderSearch is set to false only files in these directories will be processed
"js",
"css",
"build" // this is needed for Ionic 2 projects
],
"uglifyJsOptions": { // pass options to UglifyJS2 (you can include more than these below)
"compress": {
"drop_console": true
},
"mangle": false,
"output": {
"code": true
}
},
"cleanCssOptions": { // pass options to CleanCSS (you can include more than these below)
"specialComments": "all"
}
}Ionic 2 projects require a couple changes to the uglify-config.json.
- Add
buildto thefoldersToProcessproperty. - Set
mangletofalsein theuglifyJsOptions.
Ionic 2 rc.0 introduced an npm package called ionic-app-scripts. Ionic 2 includes this package to handle various things for you behind the scenes and it essentially does what cordova-uglify does and more. It uses UglifyJS2 for minifying JavaScript and clean-css to compress CSS. At this time ionic-app-scripts makes using cordova-uglify nearly obsolete - The reason it isn't a complete replacement yet is because it does not allow using all the options to UglifyJS2 via the customizable ionic_uglifyjs.json config file. One particular option it doesn't allow is the drop_console option which is important if you use console.log and want to have UglifyJS2 remove these for you. I plan to file an issue on the ionic-app-scripts GitHub and ask for it to support all possible UglifyJS2 options.
As of 0.2.6 I removed the imagemin package because the version that this hook depended on was causing issues in NPM 3 and higher. There is a newer version of imagemin available and it has been made more modular by splitting the compression for each image type into its own package. Image compression was outside the scope of what I wanted to do with this hook anyways so I may make a hook in the future that focuses just on that. I don't plan to add image compression back to this hook so if you need it you'll want to use 0.2.5 or lower.
Out of the box this hook requires Cordova 3.3.1-0.4.2 and above but it can work with versions 3.0.0 thru 3.3.0 if you manually indicate the path for the platforms directories on Android and iOS. This is because the CORDOVA_PLATFORMS environment variable was not added until version 3.3.1-0.4.2 (see this post by Dan Moore).