Introduction

This project provides a custom Ant task for compressing several JavaScript? files at once using YUI Compressor. At the moment it does not have support for minimising CSS files even though this is a feature of YUI Compressor.

More information here: http://www.simonbuckle.com/2011/02/20/yui-compressor-ant-task/

Ant Task

The name of the Ant task is "yuicompressor" (see the example below). It supports the following attributes:

A full description of the attributes (apart from todir) can be found on the YUI Compressor site: http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/compressor/

It also expects two child elements: fileset and mapper. These are required elements. The first specifies the list of files to compress; the second prescribes how they should be saved once minimised.

Example

Here's an example build file that looks for all the JavaScript files in the test directory and minimises them.

<project name="Compressor Test" default="example" basedir=".">
        
        <taskdef resource="yuicompressor.tasks" classpath="dist/yuicompressor-taskdef-1.0.jar"/>
        
        <target name="example">
                <yuicompressor linebreak="40" todir="${basedir}/test">
                        <fileset dir="${basedir}/test" includes="*.js"/>
                        <mapper type="glob" from="*.js" to="*-min.js"/>
                </yuicompressor>
        </target>

</project>

Save the file as build.example.xml in the root directory of the project. To run it, type the following: ant -lib lib/yuicompressor-2.4.2.jar -f build.example.xml.

The task relies on YUI Compressor so this must be specified using the -lib option.