Concat and minify JS files in Node

Question

Is there any module in NodeJS to concatenate and minify JavaScript files?

Answer 1

Try these two plugins for Grunt

https://www.npmjs.org/package/grunt-contrib-concat

https://www.npmjs.org/package/grunt-contrib-uglify

You can install everything you need like so:

npm install grunt
npm install grunt-cli
npm install grunt-contrib-concat
npm install grunt-contrib-uglify

Then create your grunt file, like so:

Gruntfile.js

module.exports = function(grunt){
  grunt.initConfig({
    concat: {
      options: {
        process: function(src, path){
          return '\n/* Source: ' + path + ' */\n' + src;
        }
      },
      src: [
        '../src/**/*.js'
      ],
      dest: '../bin/app-debug.js'
    },
    uglify: {
      src: '../bin/app-debug.js',
      dest: '../bin/app.js'
    },
    watch: {
      options: {
        atBegin: true,
        event: ['all']
      },
      src: {
        files: '../src/**/*.js',
        tasks: ['concat']
      },
      dist: {
        files: '../bin/app-debug.js',
        tasks: ['uglify']
      },
    }
  }

  grunt.loadNpmTasks('grunt-contrib-concat');
  grunt.loadNpmTasks('grunt-contrib-uglify');

  grunt.registerTask('default', ['watch']);
}

Finally, type grunt in the terminal and Grunt will start watching your JavaScript files for changes and automatically concat and uglify them (whenever you save a change to your js files in ../src/