Automatically minify all node_modules

Question

Is there a tool that you can run where it would take every single javascript file inside the node_modules and replaces it with its minified version?

I realize this is a very simple task that can be accomplished with looping through all .js files and passing them through a minifier, but my implementation would be slow and was hoping somebody might have a "smarter" way of doing it.

Answer 1

I had a similar problem to solve, related to the dimensions of a layer to be deployed over a Lambda AWS Layer framework. In my case the problem was related to the fact that the output layer started to increase its dimension and there was a problem both on the limitations from AWS and from a performance point of view (try to think at loading a layer of, say, 100MB compared to one of 40MB).

Anyway, given that overview I managed to do a three steps procedure in order to achieve a proper compression for the node_modules folder, and then the overall layer size.

1. Using modclean to remove unnecessary files and folders from the node_modules directory based on predefined and custom glob patterns.

2. Using node-prune a script to prune unnecessary files from node_modules directory, such as markdown, typescript source files and so on.

3. Finally we can run minify-all a function to minify all javascript and css files in nested folder as well.

The bash script file to be used in order to achieve a proper compression is the following one (in my case I had a 249MB node_modules folder and after the script it became 120MB):

npm install -g modclean
npm install -g minify-all
npm install -g node-prune

# The following will install the dependencies into the node_modules folder,
# starting from a package.json file.
npm install

# The following line will remove all the unnecessary files and folders
# with caution to all the dependencies.
modclean -n default:safe,default:caution -r

# The following will prune unnecessary files.
node-prune

# The following with minify all the javascript and css files.
minify-all

Please note that the 3rd step requires a lot of time in order to complete.

Answer 2

I haven't tried this, but it seems like this should work. You will have to install webpack

First you will have to install webpack

$ npm install -g webpack

Then you will have to install uglify-js plugin

$ npm install uglifyjs-webpack-plugin

--webpack.config.js

const UglifyJsPlugin = require('uglifyjs-webpack-plugin');

module.exports = {
  entry: './app.js',
  output: {
    filename: 'main.js',
    path: path.resolve(__dirname, 'dist')
  },
  optimization: {
    minimizer: [
      new UglifyJsPlugin({
        test: /\.js(\?.*)?$/i,
      }),
    ],
  }
};

Then in your terminal run

$ webpack --config webpack.config.js