Compressing / Minimizing JavaScript with Automator

March 19th, 2008

Compressing your JavaScript is a good idea when moving your JavaScript code to your production server. I won’t go into why (because it makes it smaller, duh) so I’ll just assume we’re both cool that it needs to be done.

My compressor of choice is Yahoo’s YUI Compressor, and it comes in a nice Java .jar that you can download and use ’til your heart’s content. However, because I’m lazy, opening the terminal, typing in the command, and feeding it files is just too difficult for me, so I (with the help of a friend of mine) wrote an Automator Finder plugin so you can just right click a .js file and click “minimize” and it creates a new one with .min.js as its extension.

Now there is no bug checking or error returning in this plugin. It’s about as dumb as it can possibly be. When you download it, be sure and point the .jar to the correct YUI .jar file in the perl script or it won’t work. If you have any suggestions for the plugin, be sure and let me know (that is, when I get my comment system working)!

The perl script is just this :

      #!/usr/bin/perl -w
      $CCMD =
      "java -jar ~/Documents/Code/yuicompressor-2.3.5/build/yuicompressor-2.3.5.jar";
      $CARGS = "-o";

      $FN = shift;
      $_ = $FN;
      s/\.js/\.min\.js/g;
      s/ /\ /g;
      $FN2 = $_;

      `$CCMD $FN $CARGS $FN2`

Without further ado, the download is here: Automator YUI Plugin