How To Run UglifyJS on Windows Using node.js

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:

set NODE_PATH=C:\EXE\UglifyJS
C:\EXE\node C:\EXE\UglifyJS\bin\uglifyjs options script-file

(Of course you should correct the pathnames to point to the locations of UglifyJS and node.exe on your system.)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 16th, 2011 at 9:12 pm and is filed under Notes for myself, Practical Javascript, Small Hacks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.