Minify Maven Plugin

Minify Maven Plugin combines and minimizes your CSS and JavaScript files for faster page loading. The plugin is compatible with all current Maven versions.

Key features

• JavaScript and CSS Minification: Automatically compresses JS and CSS files as part of the Maven build lifecycle.
• Enhanced Load Times: Reduces the size of web assets, which can lead to faster web application performance.
• Customizable: Provides options to configure the minification process to better fit your project's specific requirements.
• Maven Integration: Designed specifically for use within Maven projects, ensuring smooth workflow integration.

Origins and background

Under the hood, it uses the YUI Compressor and Google Closure Compiler but has a layer of abstraction around these tools which allows for other tools to be added in the future.

Forked from https://github.com/samaxes/minify-maven-plugin in 2023 as the original version is apparently unmaintained. For changes in the forked version and earlier please see https://github.com/sevenprinciplesmobility/minify-maven-plugin/blob/main/CHANGELOG.md

Benefits

Reduce HTTP Requests

80% of the end-user response time is spent on the front-end. Most of this time is tied up in downloading all the components in the page: images, stylesheets, scripts, etc. Reducing the number of components in turn reduces the number of HTTP requests required to render the page. This is the key to faster pages.

Combined files are a way to reduce the number of HTTP requests by combining all scripts into a single script, and similarly combining all CSS into a single stylesheet. Combining files is more challenging when the scripts and stylesheets vary from page to page, but making this part of your release process improves response times.

Compress JavaScript and CSS

Minification/compression is the practice of removing unnecessary characters from code to reduce its size thereby improving load times. A JavaScript compressor, in addition to removing comments and white-spaces, obfuscates local variables using the smallest possible variable name. This improves response time performance because the size of the downloaded file is reduced.

Usage

Configure your project's pom.xml to run the plugin during the project's build cycle.

<build>
  <plugins>
    <plugin>
      <groupId>com.7p-group</groupId>
      <artifactId>minify-maven-plugin</artifactId>
      <version>1.7.11</version>
      <executions>
        <execution>
          <id>default-minify</id>
          <configuration>
            <charset>UTF-8</charset>
            <cssSourceFiles>
              <cssSourceFile>file-1.css</cssSourceFile>
              <!-- ... -->
              <cssSourceFile>file-n.css</cssSourceFile>
            </cssSourceFiles>
            <jsSourceFiles>
              <jsSourceFile>file-1.js</jsSourceFile>
              <!-- ... -->
              <jsSourceFile>file-n.js</jsSourceFile>
            </jsSourceFiles>
            <jsEngine>CLOSURE</jsEngine>
          </configuration>
          <goals>
            <goal>minify</goal>
          </goals>
        </execution>
      </executions>
    </plugin>
  </plugins>
</build>

This plugin requires Java 11.

For more documentation see the project's documentation website at https://sevenprinciplesmobility.github.io/minify-maven-plugin/

License

This distribution is licensed under the terms of the Apache License, Version 2.0 (see LICENSE.txt).