🗑 DropCSS
An exceptionally fast, thorough and tiny unused-CSS cleaner (MIT Licensed)
Introduction
DropCSS is an exceptionally fast, thorough and tiny (~8.5 KB min) unused-CSS cleaner; it takes your HTML and CSS as input and returns only the used CSS as output. Its custom HTML and CSS parsers are highly optimized for the 99% use case and thus avoid the overhead of handling malformed markup or stylesheets, so you must provide well-formed input. There is minimal handling for complex escaping rules, so there will always exist cases of valid input that cannot be processed by DropCSS; for these infrequent cases, please start a discussion.
As a bonus, DropCSS will also remove unused @keyframes and @font-face blocks - an out-of-scope, purely intra-CSS optimization. Speaking of which, it's a good idea to run your CSS through a structural optimizer like clean-css, csso, cssnano or crass to re-group selectors, merge redundant rules, etc. It probably makes sense to do this after DropCSS, which can leave redundant blocks, e.g. .foo, .bar { color: red; }; .bar { width: 50%; } -> .bar { color: red; }; .bar { width: 50%; } if .foo is absent from your markup.
More on this project's backstory & discussions: v0.1.0 alpha: /r/javascript, Hacker News and v1.0.0 release: /r/javascript.
Live Demo: https://codepen.io/leeoniya/pen/LvbRyq
Installation
npm install -D dropcss
Usage & API
const dropcss = require('dropcss');
let html = `
<html>
<head></head>
<body>
<p>Hello World!</p>
</body>
</html>
`;
let css = `
.card {
padding: 8px;
}
p:hover a:first-child {
color: red;
}
`;
const whitelist = /#foo|\.bar/;
let dropped = new Set();
let cleaned = dropcss({
html,
css,
shouldDrop: (sel) => {
if (whitelist.test(sel))
return false;
else {
dropped.add(sel);
return true;
}
},
});
console.log(cleaned.css);
console.log(dropped);The shouldDrop hook is called for every CSS selector that could not be matched in the html. Return false to retain the selector or true to drop it.
Features
- Retention of all transient pseudo-class and pseudo-element selectors which cannot be deterministically checked from the parsed HTML.
- Supported selectors
*- universal<tag>- tag#- id.- class>- child+- adjacent sibling~- general sibling[attr]- attribute[attr=val][attr*=val][attr^=val][attr$=val][attr~=val]:not():first-child:last-child:only-child:nth-child():nth-last-child():first-of-type:last-of-type:only-of-type:nth-of-type():nth-last-of-type()
Performance
Input
test.html
- 18.8 KB minified
- 502 dom nodes via
document.querySelectorAll("*").length
styles.min.css
- 27.67 KB combined, optimized and minified via clean-css
- contents: Bootstrap's reboot.css, an in-house flexbox grid, global layout, navbars, colors & page-specific styles. (the grid accounts for ~85% of this starting weight, lots of media queries & repetition)
Output
| lib size w/deps | output size | reduction | time elapsed | unused bytes (test.html coverage) | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| DropCSS |
58.4 KB 6 Files, 2 Folders |
6.58 KB | 76.15% | 21 ms | 575 / 8.5% |
| UnCSS |
13.5 MB 2,829 Files, 301 Folders |
6.72 KB | 75.71% | 385 ms | 638 / 9.3% |
| Purgecss |
2.69 MB 560 Files, 119 Folders |
8.01 KB | 71.05% | 88 ms | 1,806 / 22.0% |
| PurifyCSS |
3.46 MB 792 Files, 207 Folders |
15.46 KB | 44.34% | 173 ms | 9,440 / 59.6% |
Notes
- About 400 "unused bytes" are due to an explicit/shared whitelist, not an inability of the tools to detect/remove that CSS.
- About 175 "unused bytes" are due to vendor-prefixed (-moz, -ms) properties & selectors that are inactive in Chrome, which is used for testing coverage.
- Purgecss does not support attribute or complex selectors: Issue #110.
A full Stress Test is also available.
JavaScript Execution
DropCSS does not load external resources or execute <script> tags, so your HTML must be fully formed (or SSR'd). Alternatively, you can use Puppeteer and a local http server to get full <script> execution.
Here's a 35 line script which does exactly that:
const httpServer = require('http-server');
const puppeteer = require('puppeteer');
const fetch = require('node-fetch');
const dropcss = require('dropcss');
const server = httpServer.createServer({root: './www'});
server.listen(8080);
(async () => {
const browser = await puppeteer.launch();
const page = await browser.newPage();
await page.goto('http://127.0.0.1:8080/index.html');
const html = await page.content();
const styleHrefs = await page.$$eval('link[rel=stylesheet]', els => Array.from(els).map(s => s.href));
await browser.close();
await Promise.all(styleHrefs.map(href =>
fetch(href).then(r => r.text()).then(css => {
let start = +new Date();
let clean = dropcss({
css,
html,
});
console.log({
stylesheet: href,
cleanCss: clean.css,
elapsed: +new Date() - start,
});
})
));
server.close();
})();Special / Escaped Sequences
DropCSS is stupid and will choke on unusual selectors, like the ones used by the popular Tailwind CSS framework:
class attributes can look like this:
<div class="px-6 pt-6 overflow-y-auto text-base lg:text-sm lg:py-12 lg:pl-6 lg:pr-8 sticky?lg:h-(screen-16)"></div>
<div class="px-2 -mx-2 py-1 transition-fast relative block hover:translate-r-2px hover:text-gray-900 text-gray-600 font-medium"></div>...and the CSS looks like this:
.sticky\?lg\:h-\(screen-16\){...}
.lg\:text-sm{...}
.lg\:focus\:text-green-700:focus{...}Ouch.
The solution is to temporarily replace the escaped characters in the HTML and CSS with some unique strings which match /[\w-]/. This allows DropCSS's tokenizer to consider the classname as one contiguous thing. After processing, we simply reverse the operation.
// remap
let css2 = css
.replace(/\\\:/gm, '__0')
.replace(/\\\//gm, '__1')
.replace(/\\\?/gm, '__2')
.replace(/\\\(/gm, '__3')
.replace(/\\\)/gm, '__4');
let html2 = html.replace(/class=["'][^"']*["']/gm, m =>
m
.replace(/\:/gm, '__0')
.replace(/\//gm, '__1')
.replace(/\?/gm, '__2')
.replace(/\(/gm, '__3')
.replace(/\)/gm, '__4')
);
let res = dropcss({
css: css2,
html: html2,
});
// undo
res.css = res.css
.replace(/__0/gm, '\\:')
.replace(/__1/gm, '\\/')
.replace(/__2/gm, '\\?')
.replace(/__3/gm, '\\(')
.replace(/__4/gm, '\\)');This performant work-around allows DropCSS to process Tailwind without issues \o/ and is easily adaptable to support other "interesting" cases. One thing to keep in mind is that shouldDrop() will be called with selectors containing the temp replacements rather than original selectors, so make sure to account for this if shouldDrop() is used to test against some whitelist.
Caveats
- Not tested against or designd to handle malformed HTML or CSS
- Excessive escaping or reserved characters in your HTML or CSS can break DropCSS's parsers
Acknowledgements
- Felix Böhm's nth-check - it's not much code, but getting
An+Bexpression testing exactly right is frustrating. I got part-way there before discovering this tiny solution. - Vadim Kiryukhin's vkbeautify - the benchmark and test code uses this tiny formatter to make it easier to spot differences in output diffs.
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