Reduce your CSS files more than 60% during your development workflow with Purgecss.
I have been searching for a while a tool that will allow me to clean my CSS from unused style.
Why was I looking for this kind of tool? Because nowadays almost every developer uses a lot of CSS frameworks and libraries to develop interfaces faster and easier so it is inevitable that the size of css files increase a lot.
But how much of the CSS style that you import from external libraries you really use? Sometimes even less than 20%, so why do you need to have all this unused style? No reason!
Purgecss
Here Purgecss comes to help, it is a tool which helps to remove unused CSS and it can be used as part of your development workflow.
How Purgecss is working under the scene? It needs to know:
1 - the file css that you want to clean.
2 - the files where it need to inspect
3 - the destination path of the new file generated
So from the initial css file[1] it will search in your html files(for example)[2] and from there it will create a new css file[3] only with the style that you really used.
I’m sure that if you try it you will be able to reduce more than 60% the size of your CSS.
The build tools
The cool thing of Purgecss is that you can implement it in your development workflow with a lot of popular build tools:
• CLI
• JavaScript API
• Webpack
• Gulp
• Rollup
The JS frameworks
We can use it also with the most modern JavaScript frameworks such as:
• React
• Vue
• Next
• Nuxt
How to use Purgecss
I wrote a whole article about how to set up a CSS build process with Gulp, there I used also Purgecss so if you are interested in this build process I suggest you to read this article.
Here on Medium (https://medium.com/notonlycss/how-to-remove-unused-css-ad67421794a7), I will show you how to implement Purgecss with Gulp and Nuxt.js.
Oldest comments (15)
I hope there's an AI that detects unused CSS. As a backend dev that uses themes, it takes a lot of time to go over each css element and see if it affects the front end.
Read the article it can be useful;)
I see.
What does this do differently then github.com/Developmint/nuxt-purgecss in nuxt case? (I'm finding that module inconsistent)
They should do the same thing, I found faster and easier to implement PurgeCSS with that plugin :)
Could you tell me maybe then why i still have classes repeated in my code sometimes with nuxt? It feels like it doesn't know about my framework (buefy in this case). So sometimes its duplicated or even include 3 sometimes on some rare occasions...
Do you import buefy in your css? I mean before that you check your css with PurgeCSS the code of Buefy is already there?
I just use the
nuxt-buefymodule for that. So i assume that gets loaded first before the build stuff is being ran... Are you using this by any chance aswell?The upper is my local dev and the bottom is the final build
thepracticaldev.s3.amazonaws.com/i...
Yes it could be, no actually I'm not using nuxt-buefy
Medium wants me to pay for this article.
What about the CSS that comes in use after some user interaction. I've tried gulp-uncss but it removes so many useful css like dropdowns, modals, popups, tooltips etc...
It should work because your dropdowns, modals, popups, tooltips etc are in your HTML. It can cause problems when you add class dynamically.
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Thank you.
Love this tool for my Vue less apps. Otherwise, had an hard time figuring out how to tell purgecss to go parse my .vue files in order to extract only used classes 😭
Does anyone have a clue how to do it? Using gulp if possible?
Hi, community mod here.