Uglify breaks ember?

1

Hello,

I’m using grunt-contrib-uglify (through lineman.js) to compile my Ember code and it doesn’t work. I see no errors, but nothing get rendered. Looking at the console, I notice Ember.TEMPLATE[“index”] for example is undefined. Can uglify break ember/handlebars? anyone had this issue?

Thanks

2

Uglify can absolutely break Ember (and any other code) depending on the options you choose. Uglify will sometimes attempt to rename global variables or methods, which can cause issues. I try to keep the compression options modest and my code works just fine. Here’s my options if you’d like a reference.

{
	compress: {
		global_defs: {
			DEBUG: false,
			RELEASE: true
		},
		sequences: true,
		properties: true,
		drop_debugger: true,
		unsafe: false,
		conditionals: true,
		comparisons: true,
		evaluate: true,
		booleans: true,
		dead_code: true,
		loops: true,
		unused: true,
		hoist_funs: false,
		hoist_vars: false,
		if_return: true,
		join_vars: true,
		cascade: true,
		warnings: true,
		negate_iife: false,
		pure_getters: false,
		pure_funcs: null,
		drop_console: true
	},
	mangle: true,
	preserveComments: false,
	report: 'gzip',
	screw_ie8: true
}

I have to mention that you should only be minifying your code. Don’t minify the Ember code; use the already minified version.

3

Thanks! Why is that I shouldn’t minify ember by myself?

4

Library vendors typically do their own minification because they know more about their code and are more likely to know exactly what compression options will/won’t break their code. Also, they run their minified code through their test suite, which you likely don’t do. In short: don’t worry about potentially breaking code that isn’t yours; just let the Ember team take care of their own code.

EDIT: I should mention, however, that I do some minification of vendor scripts. I do this because I concatenate all my scripts together and some libraries aren’t minified. But I only do whitespace minification, which is almost guaranteed not to break anything. Here’s my Uglify options for that:

{
	mangle: false,
	preserveComments: 'some', // keep licensing comments
	screw_ie8: true
}
5

Yes! I too want to concatenate all files together. But using the minified version of vendor script and using your config for that sounds good. Thanks!