Question

I’m using a shared hosting plan on Hostgator. As such I can’t run any java from the command line.

Is there any pure PHP minifiers out there that I can use? Minify uses YUICompressor.jar in the background so that won’t work.

Anyone know of something that uses just PHP to minify javascript that I can run from the command line? I would also like it to shrink variable names.

Answer 1

You could use the google js minifier. Here’s a python script which uses it to compress a bunch of javascript files with it:

import httplib
import simplejson as json
import urllib
import sys

def combine_js(js_files, minify=False):
    files = list(js_files) # create a copy which we can modify
    if not minify:
        code = []
        for path in files:
            f = open(path, 'r')
            code.append(f.read())
            f.close()
        return '\n\n'.join(code)

    def _minify(code):
        params = urllib.urlencode([
            ('js_code', code),
            ('compilation_level', 'SIMPLE_OPTIMIZATIONS'),
            ('output_format', 'json'),
            ('output_info', 'compiled_code'),
            ('output_info', 'errors'),
            ('output_info', 'warnings'),
        ])

        headers = {'Content-type': "application/x-www-form-urlencoded"}
        conn = httplib.HTTPConnection('closure-compiler.appspot.com')
        conn.request('POST', '/compile', params, headers)
        response = conn.getresponse()
        data = json.loads(response.read())
        conn.close()
        if not data.get('compiledCode'):
            print >>sys.stderr, 'WARNING: Did not get any code from google js compiler.'
            print >>sys.stderr, data
            print >>sys.stderr
            print >>sys.stderr, 'Using unminified code'
            return None
        return data.get('compiledCode')

    # Minify code in chunks to avoid the size limit
    chunks = []
    code = ''
    while len(files):
        path = files[0]
        f = open(path, 'r')
        data = f.read()
        f.close()
        # Check if we reach the size limit
        if len(code + data) >= 1000000:
            res = _minify(code)
            if res is None:
                # Fallback to unminified code
                return combine_js(js_files)
            chunks.append(res)
            code = ''
            continue
        code += data
        del files[0]
    if code:
        res = _minify(code)
        if res is None:
            # Fallback to unminified code
            return combine_js(js_files)
        chunks.append(res)
    return '\n\n'.join(chunks).strip()

if __name__ == '__main__':
    print combine_js(sys.argv[1:], True)

Usage: python filename.py path/to/your/*.js > minified.js

---

In case you are using an ancient python version and do not have simplejson installed on your system, here’s how you can get the script to work with a local simplejson version (run those commands via SSH):

cd
wget http://pypi.python.org/packages/source/s/simplejson/simplejson-2.3.2.tar.gz
tar xzf simplejson-2.3.2.tar.gz
export PYTHONPATH=$HOME/simplejson-2.3.2/