@wpconstructor/minify-assets

A fast, lightweight CLI tool for automatically minifying JavaScript and CSS files using esbuild.
Designed for WordPress plugin development, but works in any project.

It recursively scans your assets folder, generates .min.js and .min.css files, and skips unchanged files using a smart cache system.

🚀 Features

• ⚡ Fast minification using esbuild
• 📁 Recursive folder scanning
• 🧠 Cache-based incremental builds (only rebuild changed files)
• 🪟 Cross-platform (Windows, macOS, Linux)
• 👀 Watch mode for development
• 🚫 Automatically skips .min.js and .min.css
• 🔌 Perfect for WordPress plugin workflows

📦 Installation

Install as a development dependency:

npm install @wpconstructor/minify-assets --save-dev

Or install globally:

npm install -g @wpconstructor/minify-assets

⚙️ Usage

🌍 Global Usage

After installation, you can run it anywhere without npx:

wpconstr-minify assets

Watch mode:

wpconstr-minify assets --watch

💡 If the command is not found, make sure your npm global bin directory is in your system PATH:

npm config get prefix

Basic usage

npx wpconstr-minify assets

This will:

• Scan the assets/ folder
• Minify all .js and .css files
• Output .min.js and .min.css files next to originals

👀 Watch mode

Automatically rebuild files when changes are detected:

npx wpconstr-minify assets --watch

📁 Example structure

assets/
├── js/
│   ├── app.js
│   └── app.min.js (generated)
├── css/
│   ├── style.css
│   └── style.min.css (generated)

🧠 How it works

1. Scans all files in the provided directory
2. Ignores already minified files (.min.js, .min.css)
3. Generates a hash of each file
4. Compares with previous build cache
5. Only rebuilds changed files
6. Saves cache to .minify-cache.json

⚡ Example

npx wpconstr-minify ./assets

Output:

✔ Minified assets/js/app.js
✔ Minified assets/css/style.css
✔ Processed 12 files in assets

📌 WordPress usage

This tool is ideal for WordPress plugin developers:

• Minify frontend assets before deployment
• Keep development files readable
• Automatically generate production-ready assets

Then enqueue files using the get_enqueue_url function:

Check out the get-enqueue-url.php function Gist

wp_enqueue_script(
	'my-plugin-script',
	get_enqueue_url('assets/js/app.js'),
	array(),
	'1.0.0',
	true
);

🧾 Cache file

This tool generates a cache file to speed up builds:

.minify-cache.json

👉 You should ignore it in Git:

.minify-cache.json
node_modules/

🛠 Requirements

• Node.js 14+
• esbuild (installed automatically)

🔒 License

MIT

👤 Author

WPConstructor
https://wpconstructor.com

💬 Support

For issues or feature requests:

https://github.com/WPConstructor/minify-assets/issues

⭐ Why use this?

Instead of manually running build tools or configuring bundlers, this CLI gives you:

• zero-config minification
• fast incremental builds
• WordPress-ready output

Simple, fast, and focused.