minify/README.md

Welcome to Minify!
==================

Minify is an HTTP server for JS and CSS assets. It compresses and combines files
and serves it with appropriate headers, allowing conditional GET or long-Expires.

| *Before* | ![7 requests](http://mrclay.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/fiddler_before.png) |
|----------|-----------------------------------------------------------------|
| *After*  | ![2 requests](http://mrclay.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/fiddler_after.png)  |

The stats above are from a [brief walkthrough](http://mrclay.org/index.php/2008/09/19/minify-21-on-mrclayorg/) which shows how easy it is to set up Minify on an existing site. It eliminated 5 HTTP requests and reduced JS/CSS bandwidth by 70%.

Relative URLs in CSS files are rewritten to compensate for being served from a different directory.

News
----

Version [2.3.0](https://github.com/mrclay/minify/releases/tag/2.3.0) was released, mainly to deprecate some classes that will be removed in 3.0.

Installation
------------

Place the `/min/` directory as a child of your DOCUMENT_ROOT
directory: i.e. you will have: `/home/example/www/min`

You can see verify that it is working by visiting these two URLs:
- http://example.org/min/?f=min/quick-test.js
- http://example.org/min/?f=min/quick-test.css

If your server supports mod_rewrite, this URL should also work:
- http://example.org/min/f=min/quick-test.js

Configuration & Usage
---------------------

See the MIN.txt file and the [user guide](https://github.com/mrclay/minify/blob/master/docs/UserGuide.wiki.md)

Minify also comes with a [URI Builder application](https://github.com/mrclay/minify/blob/master/docs/BuilderApp.wiki.md) that can help you write URLs
for use with Minify or configure groups of files.

See the [cookbook](https://github.com/mrclay/minify/blob/master/docs/CookBook.wiki.md) for more advanced options for minification.

More [docs are available](https://github.com/mrclay/minify/tree/master/docs).

Support
-------

[Google Group](http://groups.google.com/group/minify)

Unit Testing
------------

1. Place the /min_unit_tests/ directory as a child of your DOCUMENT_ROOT
directory: i.e. you will have: /home/example/www/min_unit_tests

2. To run unit tests, access: http://example.org/min_unit_tests/test_all.php

  (If you wish, the other test_*.php files can be run to test individual
components with more verbose output.)

3. Remove /min_unit_tests/ from your DOCUMENT_ROOT when you are done.

Warnings
--------

  * Minify is designed for efficiency, but, for very high traffic sites, it will probably serve files slower than your HTTPd due to the CGI overhead of PHP. See the [FAQ](https://github.com/mrclay/minify/blob/master/docs/FAQ.wiki.md#how-fast-is-it) and [CookBook](https://github.com/mrclay/minify/blob/master/docs/CookBook.wiki.md) for more info.
  * If you combine a lot of CSS, watch out for [IE's 4096 selectors-per-file limit](http://stackoverflow.com/a/9906889/3779), affects IE 6 through 9.
  * Minify *should* work fine with files encoded in UTF-8 or other 8-bit encodings like ISO 8859/Windows-1252. By default Minify appends ";charset=utf-8" to the Content-Type headers it sends.

Acknowledgments
---------------

Minify was inspired by [jscsscomp](http://code.google.com/p/jscsscomp/) by Maxim Martynyuk and by the article [Supercharged JavaScript](http://www.hunlock.com/blogs/Supercharged_Javascript) by Patrick Hunlock.

The [JSMin library](http://www.crockford.com/javascript/jsmin.html) used for JavaScript minification was originally written by Douglas Crockford and was [ported to PHP](https://github.com/mrclay/jsmin-php) by Ryan Grove specifically for use in Minify.