telling uglify to keep certain comments (using CodeKit)

Question

I'm using CodeKit to develop a WordPress theme. Of course I'd like to compress the LESS when it's compiled into CSS, but uglify.js removes all comments.

Does anyone know how to mark specific comments for preservation?

Edit: just wanted to add that after trying this in 2019 with CodeKit 3, the exclamation point trick works perfectly! (Allen Bargi's answer)

Allen Bargi · Accepted Answer · 2015-03-27T05:47:32.647

13

~~There's convention to put an exclamation mark right after the comment, to preserve it after minifying. you should use something like this:~~

/*!
  this comment will not be removed by minifiers
 */

The above answer is not valid anymore! things evolve!

Now you should add either @preserve or @license to the comment as mentioned by @texelate below.

edited Mar 27 '15 at 05:47

answered Apr 28 '12 at 17:30

Allen Bargi

14,674
9
59
58

6

uglify doesn't respect that, not by default at least – Benja May 14 '14 at 19:29
@allen, this is not the default! – Mirko Pagliai Oct 16 '14 at 15:34
This is wrong and shouldn't be the accepted answer. See my answer. – texelate Mar 20 '15 at 11:17
Just to help any newbies, this means `/*@preserve comment here */` – George Jan 19 '18 at 22:23
Coming back to this in 2019, and in CodeKit 3, this convention works beautifully! I can compress EVERYTHING now. Adding a CSS map helps me work out issues in the inspector too. – rgb_life Dec 03 '19 at 03:31

score 10 · Answer 2 · answered Mar 20 '15 at 11:17

10

You need to add either @preserve or @license to the comments you want to keep. It doesn't honour /*!

answered Mar 20 '15 at 11:17

texelate

2,460
3
24
32

score 5 · Answer 3 · answered Oct 23 '13 at 08:34

5

You can use this way: --comments '/foo|bar/' : will keep only comments that contain "foo" or "bar". See more : https://github.com/mishoo/UglifyJS2#keeping-copyright-notices-or-other-comments

answered Oct 23 '13 at 08:34

anemone928

139
1
5

score 4 · Answer 4 · edited Sep 16 '20 at 06:34

4

Half a year later, I hit the same issue and the exclamation mark trick did not "do the trick" for me. Neither any of the @preserve or @license options listed in uglify documentation. What did work is providing a regex on the commandline, e.g.:

uglifyjs file.js -c -m --comments '/^!|@(?:license|preserve)/' > file.min.js

edited Sep 16 '20 at 06:34

Walf

8,535
2
44
59

answered Feb 16 '13 at 13:13

soquel

89
3

1

to respect more styles, including `/*!`, I used `--comments '/(^!|@license|@preserve)/'`. Test: `uglifyjs -c -m --comments '/(^!|@license|@preserve)/' <<< 'test(); /* regular */ /*! important */ /*@license foo */ noop(); /*bar @preserve*/ // regular'` – kubi Apr 11 '19 at 13:26

telling uglify to keep certain comments (using CodeKit)

4 Answers4