CSS Combine Files & Compress

Question

I want to be able to, at build-time, submit a group of CSS files and have the following done:

• Combine all CSS files into one CSS file
• Combine all overlapping selectors
• Remove all comments
• Remove unnecessary white space
• Remove empty styles

I'm sure there are others, but this what I'm starting with.

This is the preference order of how I would like to access the tool:

1. Remote Website
2. Web Hosted Installed - same as my website (Debian/PHP 5.2.12)
3. Local Machine Installed (Windows 7)

I saw CSS Compressor, but it doesn't seem to combine CSS files nor does it combine overlapping CSS selectors.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

I would recommend the YUI compressor since it is widely used and has a command line interface.

You should also consider making your build process automated so that you can build everything with a single command. If you don't want to use an existing build tool you could create a short .bat file for this kind of task.

---

First, combine your files:

type file1.css file2.css file3.css > combined.css

then pass it to the YUI compressor:

java -jar yuicompressor.jar combined.css > combined-min.css