A few days ago, I’ve been looking for a JavaScript minifier and wondered what the jQuery team may be using today. Turned out, they have abandoned Google Closure in favor of UglifyJS – a JavaScript parser/compressor/beautifier created by Mihai Bazon. UglifyJS is written in JavaScript and therefore should run on any JavaScript engine, but its “native” one is node.js, which is only available for Unix-like systems, including Linux, BSD, and Mac, but not for Windows. Or so I thought.
Fact is, Microsoft is now helping port node.js to Windows, and there is already a Windows build available, very elegant – just one 10MB file called node.exe
:) – albeit unstable. Anyway, as of version 0.5.4 it seems to be capable of running UglifyJS. You just need to set the NODE_PATH
environment variable accordingly:
(Of course you should correct the pathnames to point to the locations of UglifyJS and node.exe
on your system.)