How do I concatenate JavaScript files into one file?

Question

I want to create a compiled JavaScript file for my website. For development I would prefer to keep the JavaScript in separate files and just as part of my automated scripts concatenate the files into one and run the compressor over it.

My problem is that if I use the old DOS copy command it also puts in the EOF markers which the compressor complains about:

copy /A *.js compiled.js /Y

What are other people doing?

Answer 1

I recommend using Apache Ant and YUI Compressor.

http://ant.apache.org/

http://yui.github.com/yuicompressor/

Put something like this in the Ant build xml. It will create two files, application.js and application-min.js.

<target name="concatenate" description="Concatenate all js files">
    <concat destfile="build/application.js">
        <fileset dir="src/js" includes="*.js" />
    </concat>
</target>

<target name="compress" depends="concatenate" description="Compress application.js to application-min.js">
    <apply executable="java" parallel="false">
        <filelist dir="build" files="application.js" />
        <arg line="-jar" />
        <arg path="path/to/yuicompressor-2.4.2.jar" />
        <srcfile />
        <arg line="-o" />
        <mapper type="glob" from="*.js" to="build/*-min.js" />
        <targetfile />
    </apply>
</target>