JarCastingbabel-minify (beta)
An ES6+ aware minifier based on the Babel toolchain.
babel-minifyis consumable via API, CLI, or Babel preset. Try it online - babeljs.io/repl
Historical note: babel-minify was renamed from babili.
Table of Contents
Experimental
babel-minify is an experimental project that attempts to use Babel's toolchain (for compilation) to do something in a similar vein, minification. It's currently in 0.x, so we don't recommend using it in production.
Checkout our CONTRIBUTING.md if you want to help out!
Requirements
- node >= 6
- babel >= 6.20.0
Why
Current tools don't support targeting the latest version of ECMAScript. (yet)
- BabelMinify can because it is just a set of Babel plugins, and Babel already understands new syntax with our parser Babylon.
- When it's possible to only target browsers that support newer ES features, code sizes can be smaller because you don't have to transpile and then minify.
Check out our blog post for more info!
// Example ES2015 Code
class Mangler {
constructor(program) {
this.program = program;
}
}
new Mangler(); // without this it would just output nothing since Mangler isn't used
Before
// ES2015+ code -> Babel -> BabelMinify/Uglify -> Minified ES5 Code
var a=function a(b){_classCallCheck(this,a),this.program=b};new a;
After
// ES2015+ code -> BabelMinify -> Minified ES2015+ Code
class a{constructor(b){this.program=b}}new a;
CLI
| Package | Version | Dependencies |
|---|---|---|
babel-minify |
 |
 |
Install
npm install babel-minify --save-dev
Usage
minify src -d lib
Babel preset
| Package | Version | Dependencies |
|---|---|---|
babel-preset-minify |
 |
 |
Install
npm install babel-preset-minify --save-dev
Usage
note: minify is still in beta, so we don't recommend using it for production code but rather the production environment.
When testing, it's recommended to run minifiers for production so less code is sent to end-users vs. in development where it can be an issue for readability when debugging. Check out the env docs for more help.
Options specific to a certain environment are merged into and overwrite non-env specific options.
.babelrc:
{
"presets": ["es2015"],
"env": {
"production": {
"presets": ["minify"]
}
}
}
Then you'll need to set the env variable which could be something like BABEL_ENV=production npm run build
Individual Plugins
The minify repo is comprised of many npm packages. It is a lerna monorepo similar to babel itself.
The npm package babel-preset-minify is at the path packages/babel-preset-minify
Usage
Normally you wouldn't be consuming the plugins directly since the preset is available.
Add to your .babelrc's plugins array.
{
"plugins": ["babel-plugin-transform-undefined-to-void"]
}
Other
| Package | Version | Dependencies |
|---|---|---|
babel-plugin-transform-inline-environment-variables |
 |
 |
babel-plugin-transform-node-env-inline |
 |
 |
babel-plugin-transform-remove-console |
 |
 |
babel-plugin-transform-remove-debugger |
 |
 |
Benchmarks
Bootstrap:
npm run bootstrap
Build:
npm run build
Running the benchmarks:
./scripts/benchmark.js [file...]- defaults to a few packages fetched from unpkg.com and is defined in benchmark.js.
Note: All Input sources are ES5.
Benchmark Results for react.js:
Input Size: 54.79KB
Input Size (gzip): 15.11KB
| minifier | output raw | raw win | gzip output | gzip win | parse time (ms) | minify time (ms) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| babel-minify | 15.97KB | 71% | 6.08KB | 60% | 1.00 | 1039.06 |
| terser | 15.65KB | 71% | 5.98KB | 60% | 0.93 | 532.19 |
| uglify | 15.6KB | 72% | 6KB | 60% | 1.09 | 463.69 |
| closure-compiler | 15.74KB | 71% | 6.04KB | 60% | 1.22 | 2361.41 |
| closure-compiler-js | 18.21KB | 67% | 6.73KB | 55% | 1.08 | 3381.47 |
Benchmark Results for vue.js:
Input Size: 282.52KB
Input Size (gzip): 77.52KB
| minifier | output raw | raw win | gzip output | gzip win | parse time (ms) | minify time (ms) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| babel-minify | 104.21KB | 63% | 38.71KB | 50% | 6.09 | 3538.30 |
| terser | 103.12KB | 63% | 37.92KB | 51% | 6.42 | 1680.85 |
| uglify | 102.71KB | 64% | 38.08KB | 51% | 6.59 | 1662.50 |
| closure-compiler | 101.93KB | 64% | 38.6KB | 50% | 10.41 | 4413.06 |
| closure-compiler-js | 105.18KB | 63% | 39.5KB | 49% | 6.79 | 12082.80 |
Benchmark Results for lodash.js:
Input Size: 527.18KB
Input Size (gzip): 94.04KB
| minifier | output raw | raw win | gzip output | gzip win | parse time (ms) | minify time (ms) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| babel-minify | 69.59KB | 87% | 24.37KB | 74% | 5.38 | 2587.27 |
| terser | 68.66KB | 87% | 24.31KB | 74% | 6.41 | 1913.43 |
| uglify | 68.15KB | 87% | 24.05KB | 74% | 5.89 | 2075.71 |
| closure-compiler | 71.05KB | 87% | 24.19KB | 74% | 6.24 | 4119.43 |
| closure-compiler-js | 73.51KB | 86% | 24.94KB | 73% | 5.17 | 9650.59 |
Benchmark Results for three.js:
Input Size: 1.05MB
Input Size (gzip): 212.43KB
| minifier | output raw | raw win | gzip output | gzip win | parse time (ms) | minify time (ms) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| babel-minify | 535.88KB | 50% | 134.66KB | 37% | 27.24 | 9988.57 |
| terser | 536.16KB | 50% | 132.78KB | 37% | 28.39 | 3919.34 |
| uglify | 533.42KB | 50% | 133.21KB | 37% | 26.15 | 4025.20 |
| closure-compiler | 532.44KB | 51% | 134.41KB | 37% | 29.96 | 9029.19 |
| closure-compiler-js | 543.08KB | 50% | 136.3KB | 36% | 24.36 | 95743.77 |
Browser support
Babel Minify is best at targeting latest browsers (with full ES6+ support) but can also be used with the usual Babel es2015 preset to transpile down the code first.
Team
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Amjad Masad | Boopathi Rajaa | Juriy Zaytsev | Henry Zhu | Vignesh Shanmugam |
| @amasad | @boopathi | @kangax | @hzoo | @vigneshshanmugam |
| @amasad | @heisenbugger | @kangax | @left_pad | @_vigneshh |
