About tgext.minify

tgext.minify is a Turbogears 2 middleware that automatically minifies your javascript and CSS and cache it. It’s able to obfuscate your js too. CSS minifier based on rCSSmin by André Malo. JS minifier/obfuscator based on SlimIt by Ruslan Spivak The middleware is based on tgext.scss by Alessandro Molina

Installing

tgext.scss can be installed both from pypi or from bitbucket:

easy_install tgext.minify

should just work for most of the users

Enabling tgext.minify

If tgext.pluggable is available enabling tgext.minify is just a matter of appending to your config/app_cfg.py:

from tgext.pluggable import plug
plug(base_config, 'tgext.minify')

Otherwise manually using tgext.minify is really simple, you edit your config/middeware.py and just after the #Wrap your base TurboGears 2 application with custom middleware here comment wrap app with MinifyMiddleware:

from tgext.minify import MinifyMiddleware

make_base_app = base_config.setup_tg_wsgi_app(load_environment)

def make_app(global_conf, full_stack=True, **app_conf):
    app = make_base_app(global_conf, full_stack=True, **app_conf)

    # Wrap your base TurboGears 2 application with custom middleware here
    app = MinifyMiddleware(app)

    return app

Now you just have to put your beautiful .css and .js files inside public/ and they will be served as minified.

JS obfuscation

If you need to obfuscate your javascript, just add mangle_js = true to your development.ini. If you want to obfuscate also the global scope, add mangle_js_toplevel = true. Keep in mind that if you obfuscate your js, you have to join js files that depends on each other, or the namespace will be messed up.

Performance boost

Here is the report of a benchmark made on paster serving bootstrap.css with and without the middleware and then bootstrap.min.js already minified (without using the middleware):

$ /usr/sbin/ab -n 1000 http://localhost:8080/css/bootstrap.css
Requests per second:    1135.50 [#/sec] (mean)

$ /usr/sbin/ab -n 1000 http://localhost:8080/css/bootstrap.css
Requests per second:    714.99 [#/sec] (mean)

$ /usr/sbin/ab -n 1000 http://localhost:8080/css/bootstrap.min.css
Requests per second:    806.26 [#/sec] (mean)

In these case serving the unminified css using tgext.minify is even faster than directly serving the same css file as it is served from memory (due to caching performed by tgext.minify).