Purgecss

Easily remove unused CSS

16 followers

Easily remove unused CSS

16 followers

When you are building a website with a css framework like Bootstrap, you will only use a part of the framework and unused css styles will be included. Purgecss removes unused selectors from your css, resulting in smaller files. "With PurgeCSS, you'll have a hard time generating CSS that isn't under 10kb minified and gzipped." - Tailwindcss docs

Launch tags:Open Source•Software Engineering•Developer Tools

Launch Team

Framer AI AgentsDesign and publish professional sites with AI

Promoted

How does it handle JavaScript-generated elements, though? It appears that it digs in your HTML, compares it with your CSS and removes unnecessary stuff. But what if you append an element with jQuery and give it a class `js-my-button`? It wouldn’t be in your HTML so any styles applied to it in your CSS would be removed? 🤔 Nick DeNardis says in his article that it "is searching through all .html, .blade.php, .js and .vue files" but it seems suspicious to me. There are so many ways to create elements in JS and style them. How does it guarantee that it won’t stab you in the throat by removing something that’s actually used?

Report

8yr ago

Tosin

Maker

@hristiyandodov Purgecss was designed to be modular and works with every type of files. One of the step of the process is to get the used selectors in the content files (e.g. js). By default, it will look into each word in the file and consider it a selector. So if you add a class with jquery `.addClass(“js-my-button”)`, `js-my-button` will be register as a used selector. You can customize this behavior and provide a function to select the selector in the file.

Report

8yr ago

@ffloriel_ Alright, but what if the class name is formed on runtime through a variable like that: $elem.addClass("js-my-" + name); Would it leave all rules that contain `js-my-`?

Report

8yr ago

Tosin

Maker

@hristiyandodov With the default settings, it will not consider `js-my-button` used and will remove the css. There are a few options to go around this problem. One is to whitelist the selector. The second one is to create a custom extractor. I am experimenting with it at the moment in the purgecss-from-js repo. The idea is to use prepack the code and generate the classname so that Purgecss can find them. Links: whitelisting in purgecss: https://www.purgecss.com/whiteli... purgecss-from-js: https://github.com/FullHuman/pur... Facebook prepack: https://prepack.io/

Report

8yr ago

The Violet Society

I'm trying to use Purgecss now and I think it's getting stuck on sass variable names; do you know if that's the issue if I'm getting errors like "CssSyntaxError: :16:12: Unknown word"?

Report

8yr ago

I love it.

Pros:

easy to use, useful tool for frontend

Cons:

maybe the scope can be extend

Report

8yr ago

Robot Recipes

I've wanted something like this forever! If you can also incorporate a feature to show how many times something is used that would be an extra bonus.

Report

8yr ago

Awesome and easy tool to improve performance

Pros:

Easy to use

Cons:

At this moment anything

Report

8yr ago

Vivint

Such a needed resource for web developers. It can be so tough to keep track of the CSS you're not using anymore that is dragging down your page load times and unnecessarily complicating your code.

Report

8yr ago

Shuuka

purgecss also works with grunt, angular?

Report

8yr ago

Tosin

Maker

@edwardvasquezdr Purgecss is framework agnostic. It is not specific to a framework or plateform. There is currently no grunt plugin for it. Purgecss is available via a CLI, a javascript API, Webpack, Gulp and Rollup plugins. I will add Grunt shortly.

Report

8yr ago