Tool for minification of css and javascript files
Project description
Shrink is a command for concatenating and compressing css stylesheets and javascript files making them smaller. Shrinking (or minifying) these files reduces the number of request that are made after a page load and also the size of these requests.
This command depends on YUI Compressor to do the work, and can be run with Python 2.5 and above.
INI style config files are used to know which files will be minified and also to know which ones will be merged before minimization.
To display script information and options run:
$ shrink -h
Minimize css and js files
To minimize all files, run:
$ shrink -f example_shrink.cfg all
This will use yuicompressor.jar and the example_shrink.cfg file in current directory to compress all files.
In case that minimzation is not desired for all files, is also possible to minimize individual files, or a group of files, by using the name(s) of each section instead of all as argument.
To list available sections, run:
$ shrink -f example_shrink.cfg -l
Config file format
Config file is an INI file with a section defined for each individual file that can be generated.
For minification of a single file a section would be written as:
[sample-single-file-js] source_directory = %(base_dir)s/js destination_file = sample-file.min.js source_files = sample-file.js
- Section options:
source_directory value will point to the directory where file(s) listed in source_files are located.
source_files value can be a single file name, or a list of file names. When a list of names is given, each file in list is concatenated (from top to down) into a single file before compression.
destination_directory When this value is present it is used as output directory for the minified file. By default minified file is generated in source directory.
destination_file value is the name for the minified file.
hash when true include destination file in shrink hash. See Shrink hash file.
Many files can be specified to be concatenated into a single file that will be named with the value given in destination_file, by writing a section like:
[sample-multiple-file-css]
source_directory = %(base_dir)s/css
destination_file = sample-multiple-file.min.css
source_files =
sample-file1.css
sample-file2.css
sample-file3.css
Section groups
Instead of running script with sample-single-file-js and sample-multiple-file-css as arguments is possible to define a group like:
[sample-group]
group =
sample-single-file-js
sample-multiple-file-css
And then run minifier script with sample-group as parameter.
Shrink hash file
After minification Shrink can create a file containing a SHA1 hash. The file is created when at least one section in config file has hash = true. Hash is created using the contents of all destination files in these sections.
This is useful to know when some files changed, and to reload static css and javascript files without using a timestamp or version number. Sometime can be desirable to reload modified static files without increasing application version. In these cases the hash can be used as request parameter instead of version number.
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