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Asked: 2026-05-11T19:46:42+00:00

I’ve been using yuicompressor.jar on my test server for on-the-fly minimisation of changed JavaScript

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I’ve been using yuicompressor.jar on my test server for on-the-fly minimisation of changed JavaScript files. Now that I have deployed the website to the public server, I noticed that the server’s policies forbid the use of exec() or its equivalents, so no more java execution for me.

Is there a decent on-the-fly JS compressor implemented in PHP? The only thing resembling this that I was able to find was Minify, but it’s more of a full-blown compression solution with cache and everything. I want to keep the files separate and have the minimised files follow my own naming conventions, so Minify is a bit too complex for this purpose.

The tool, like yuicompressor, should be able to take either a filename or JavaScript as input and should either write to a file or output the compressed JavaScript.

EDIT: To clarify, I’m looking for something that does not have to be used as a standalone (i.e. it can be called from a function, rather than sniffing my GET variables). If I just wanted a compressor, Minify would obviously be a good choice.

EDIT2: A lot has changed in the five years since I asked this question. Today I would strongly recommend separating the front-end workflow from the server code. There are plenty of good tools for JS development around and except for the most trivial jQuery enhancements it’s a better idea to have a full workflow with automated bundling, testing and linting in place and just deploy the minified bundles rather than the raw files.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Yes there is, it’s called minify.

    The only thing in to worry about in the way of complexity is setting up a group, and there’s really nothing to it. Edit the groupsConfig.php file if you want multiple JS/CSS in one <script> or <link> statement:

    return array(
     'js-common' => array('//js/jquery/jquery-1.3.2.min.js', '//js/common.js', '//js/visuals.js',
'//js/jquery/facebox.js'),
     'css-common' => array('//css/main.css', '//css/layout.css','//css/facebox.css')
);

    To include the above ‘js-common’ group, do this:

    <script type="text/javascript" src="/min/g=js-common"></script>
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