esbuild-loader VS purgecss

i see. there are a loaders like https://github.com/privatenumber/esbuild-loader that works with webpack but i haven't given it a try yet.

you can use it with webpack didn't try it myself

If you are a webpack user and have heard about esbuild speed, you may start questioning your js-bundler choices. Luckily, you don't have to drop your hand-crafted webpack config just now. Thanks to esbuild-loader, you can get part of the speed improvement without doing a whole migration.

esbuild-loader (secret sauce!) fork-ts-checker-webpack-plugin (helps us with typechecking) nodemon-webpack-plugin (We can also use webpack-dev-server)

For people already on webpack, there's esbuild-loader (https://github.com/privatenumber/esbuild-loader)

esbuild is a JS and TS bundler that promises ultra-fast build times. We use webpack, and there is support to leverage esbuild with esbuild-loader.

The first thing I did was replace babel-loader and Terser (minification tool) with esbuild-loader. This made our JS compile around 12 times faster, it went down to 1.4 seconds. It was a good start.

In fact, the create-react-app-esbuild is only an encapsulation of esbuild-loader.

I just started using this: privatenumber/esbuild-loader: ⚡️ Speed up your Webpack build with esbuild (github.com)

Both would be good to file. I’m happy to investigate myself if you don’t have the time.

One thing to be aware of is that some other tools that integrate esbuild do so incorrectly. For example, the 3rd-party integration of esbuild into Webpack mis-configures esbuild in a way that causes issues with JSX: https://github.com/privatenumber/esbuild-loader/pull/107. This isn’t a problem with esbuild itself.

PurgeCSS is a powerful tool that scans your project files for any class names used and removes the unused ones from the final CSS file. This significantly reduces the size of the generated CSS, making your application load faster.

As a starting point, Tailwind used to use PurgeCSS [0] but I'm not sure what they use now.

[0] https://purgecss.com

A similar question was already posted here but, I think looking at the raw html, we will be able to better determine the required css than what Purgecss does.

PurgeCss

Webpack minifies JS and CSS files by default when we build them in production mode. But it does not remove useless styles or classes. For this, you can use libraries like https://purgecss.com/ Do not forget to check the dependency, connect only the functionality that you use.

When I searched online I couldn't find an "industry standard" solution to this problem. What I ended up doing was using the popular tool PurgeCSS along with a quick Python script to generate the appropriate command. What the PurgeCSS tool does is search for all your HTML files, gather all the CSS classes used, and then "purge" all the unused ones from the CSS file. You just need to declare all the HTML files you have.

Skeleventy gives you a rock-solid foundation to build fast and accessible static websites, with clean, understated design. Features include a minimal build pipeline with Laravel Mix, the Sass-powered utility class generator Gorko, Purge CSS, an HTML minifier, SEO-friendly page metadata, image lazy loading, responsive navigation, and an XML sitemap.

You could look into using PurgeCSS and its cli?

Unable to get rid of unused styles. Importing components individually and setting styles in SASS can greatly simplify builds, but several common unused styles can't be deleted using PurgeCSS and analogues due to dynamic class names.