Minimize Node js application .js files? - node.js

We have developed a desktop application using node webkit and it works fine. My only doubt is that, do we need to perform minification on the .js files written as part of node js server component. We usually perform minification on the javascript written mainly for UI view to reduce payload during loading of related javascripts of the HTML and also to hide coding information in the scripts so that its hard to modify.
So do we need to perform similar kind of concatenation and minification process on the node js server side .js files and then share the node webkit executable to the Customer. Without minification of node js files, the application works perfectly fine.
So, going back to my question -- Do we need to perform javascripts concatenation and minification for node js application?

Minification is generally to save bandwidth when downloading script files over the internet, so there isn't any real point to minifying your node.js files on your server if they aren't served anywhere.
I really doubt your server's storage needs to save a few kilobytes.

Related

React plugin to write files to server in development mode

I am looking for a ready solution for the React development mode that allows modifying server-side files from the client-side scripts.
How it can work? For example, it is a small server script or an extension for create-react-app that can receive upload requests from the client-side script to modify source files.
I need to renew several source files (files2) automatically when other source files (files1) are modified. The client-side react script will process the js object taken from the custom webpack loader, that loads source files1, then I need to renew some source files2 that is using by another webpack loader.
This scheme will not be active in a production mode.
I know I can write my own nodejs based server that will communicate with my client script and modify files, but I am looking for existing solutions and furthermore, I'd like to use the same connection that React development server created to avoid CORS headaches, etc.
Do you know something good about this?

How to use node_module packages correctly

So, I'm heading to new territory in web dev.
I set up a basic npm project using npm init in my project folder. I don't have angular, react or any other Dev framework running. Basically I want to get started with some npm packages to easily update the things I need.
For my first test I picked bootstrap and font-awesome.
For testing I have a http-server running and displaying a index.html file from the public folder.
The site I'm displaying is a basic html site for now. How do I actually implementy packages the right way? Using <link rel="stylesheet" href="/path/to/node_modules/..."> is one option but not actually the way it is done, right?
Or will it be repacked once I'm ready for production. Since node_modules is not going to be transferred to the prod server.
Thank you very much in advance!
there is a difference between running javascript in nodejs and the browser javascript engine.
although nodejs is built on top of v8 javascript engine, nodejs is different in some ways, here are 2 of them:
nodejs is used mainly in server-side programming, where javascript is used for client-side
nodejs has builtin libraries which are not in the javascript specifications
if you are developing a client-side in nodejs (using react, angular or any other client-side frameworks), you will have to "convert" (a process called transpiling) it to run within the browser.
there are several tools which can help you in the process of transpiling your code. some famous ones are webpack and parcel in conjunction with babel (to pollyfill) to "build" your project and yield a bundled (few javascript file, usually one, that bundles all the javascript code into one of more files) javascript file(s), which are loaded by the webpage.
as you can see, once the project is bundled, node_modules directory has no use -- exactly what you want.

How do I package node.js app into single file (without bundling node.js itself)?

I'm looking for a way to deliver a node.js server-side application (not browser) as a single file that contains all my code and node_modules. Well, it can be a few files, but I'd like to avoid shipping 10,000+ files, that are usually in node_modules.
I've used solutions like pkg, but I don't need an executable that has node.js bundled. I'd rather ship node.js separately and only have a bundle with code. This would be especially useful as I need to ship a few applications and don't need each of them to contain a copy of node.js.
Appreciate any suggestions.

Angular2 deploying to production environment questions

Some questions to put angular2 web project to production environment
We do development on lite server but what is best for production? Is is some other server module of nodejs? Technically we can have any server (apache, tomcat, etc).
How should we do source code management for below context.
browser must include js files so project should have js files when deployed
In standard java project we just commit .java files and uses jenkins (may be other tools) to compile and make the deploy-able structure
Should we follow same strategy here? i.e. don't commit compiled js files and deploy using some node compiler which takes ts files and compiles it to js
What is the best way to minify/obfuscate the js files
I know a way using outDir and outFile with grump but I don't want every files tobe included in one minified file because it kills the concept of lazy loading
Is there a way to minify and obfuscate js files on compile time only?
What enableProdMode() do? How it is different than not using it?
Here are some answers to your questions:
Angular2 applications only consist of static files so they can be serve by any static Web servers or server applications that can define static folders (Express, ...)
Regarding source code management, you must have a packaging phase to optimize the application loading (gater files, uglify, ...). Your source code must contain your TypeScript files (or JS files if using ES5 or ES6). Such packaging can be done using Gulp for example. Your Jenkins server will be able to checkout the source code, build it and execute tests.
In fact, when not using the outFile property of the TypeScript compiler, you won't be able to gather all the JS compiled files into a single one since anonymous modules will be created within each JS files.
See this question for more details of this:
How do I actually deploy an Angular 2 + Typescript + systemjs app?
Regarding prod mode, here is an extract of the documentation:
Disable Angular's development mode, which turns off assertions and other checks within the framework.
One important assertion this disables verifies that a change detection pass does not result in additional changes to any bindings (also known as unidirectional data flow).

Node.js on Heroku: use middleware on development, but static assets on production?

Some middle languages, such as Stylus, provides two ways to be compiled: through connect middleware or through CLI tool. The later can generate static compiled assets(i.e. .css files).
So I want to use middleware on development mode but static assets on production. I know that I can use app.configure('developmen'...) to ask express (not) to use some middlewares on development mode.
On an IaaS enviroment, like Amazon EC2, I can run a simple shell script to automatically re-compile all my assets. But how about PaaS, specifically Heroku? How can I tell it where my .styl are and where the .css should be generated?
You may want to take a look at https://github.com/adunkman/connect-assets . It caches any built javascript or css files (it has stylus built-in support for stylus) if you pass it build:true .
You can ignore snockets (sprockets-like javascript include system) if you're not interested, although I enjoy using it. #= require_tree app and you include all the js files in that directory. And in development, you get separate script includes for easy debugging.
The biggest downside of serving directly with connect-assets on Heroku is that you need to git push to Heroku for every update to client code, which automatically triggers a restart. I ended up manually building my assets (with stylus and snockets), then uploading to S3. If you don't need to update the client code often, it's not that big of a problem though.
You can take a look at express-cdn, which will upload your assets to S3 on server start.
What I ended up doing was signing up at CloudFlare, and found that it wasn't as fast as using CloudFront, but it was very easy to setup and it works better than serving asset files from my dyno.

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