What's the difference between concat and uglify and minify?

concatenation gruntjs minify uglifyjs
mheavers picture mheavers · Oct 30, 2013 · Viewed 27k times · Source

What's the difference between concat, uglify, and minify tasks in grunt? I set up an uglify task for all of my site's javascript tasks, and it seemed to both minify and concatenate them. Grunt's site has a great description for how to configure each task, but it doesn't seem to explain what each task actually does.

Answer

diclophis picture diclophis · Oct 30, 2013

  • Concatenation is just appending all of the static files into one large file.

  • Minification is just removing unnecesary whitespace and redundant / optional tokens like curlys and semicolons, and can be reversed by using a linter.

  • Uglification is the act of transforming the code into an "unreadable" form, that is, renaming variables/functions to hide the original intent... It is, also, irreversable.

Related questions

How to concatenate and minify multiple CSS and JavaScript files with Grunt.js (0.3.x)

Note: This question is only relevant for Grunt 0.3.x and has been left for reference. For help with the latest Grunt 1.x release please see my comment below this question. I'm currently trying to use Grunt.js to setup an …

Read More
How do I concatenate two lists in Python?

How do I concatenate two lists in Python? Example: listone = [1, 2, 3] listtwo = [4, 5, 6] Expected outcome: >>> joinedlist [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]

Read More
How to concatenate items in a list to a single string?

Is there a simpler way to concatenate string items in a list into a single string? Can I use the str.join() function? E.g. this is the input ['this','is','a','sentence'] and this is the desired output this-is-a-sentence …

Read More