An extremely fast JavaScript bundler and minifier

esbuild

This is a JavaScript bundler and minifier. It packages up JavaScript code for distribution on the web.

Why?

Why build another JavaScript build tool? The current build tools for the web are at least an order of magnitude slower than they should be. I’m hoping that this project serves as an “existence proof” that our JavaScript tooling can be much, much faster.

Benchmarks

The use case I have in mind is packaging a large codebase for production. This includes minifying the code, which reduces network transfer time, and producing source maps, which are important for debugging errors in production. Ideally the build tool should also build quickly without having to warm up a cache first.

My main benchmark approximates a large codebase by duplicating the three.js library 10 times and building a single bundle from scratch, without any caches. For this benchmark, esbuild is 10-100x faster than the other JavaScript bundlers I tested (Webpack, Rollup, Parcel, and FuseBox). The benchmark can be run with make bench-three.

Each time reported is the best of three runs. I’m running esbuild with --bundle --minify --sourcemap. I used the rollup-plugin-terser plugin because rollup itself doesn’t support minification. Webpack uses --mode=production --devtool=sourcemap. Parcel uses the default options. FuseBox is configured with useSingleBundle: true. Absolute speed is based on the total line count including comments and blank lines, which is currently 547,441. The tests were done on a 6-core 2019 MacBook Pro with 16gb of RAM.

Why is it fast?

Several reasons:

• It’s written in Go, a language that compiles to native code
• Parsing, printing, and source map generation are all fully parallelized
• Everything is done in very few passes without expensive data transformations
• Code is written with speed in mind, and tries to avoid unnecessary allocations

Status

Currently supported:

• CommonJS modules
• ES6 modules
• Bundling with static binding of ES6 modules using --bundle
• Full minification with --minify (whitespace, identifiers, and mangling)
• Full source map support when --sourcemap is enabled
• JSX-to-JavaScript conversion for .jsx files
• Compile-time identifier substitutions via --define
• Path substitution using the browser field in package.json
• Automatic detection of baseUrl in tsconfig.json

This is a hobby project that I wrote over the 2019-2020 winter break. I believe that it’s relatively complete and functional. However, it’s brand new code and probably has a lot of bugs. It also hasn’t yet been used in production by anyone. Use at your own risk.

Also keep in mind that this doesn’t have complete support for lowering modern language syntax to earlier language versions. Right now only class fields and the nullish coalescing operator are lowered.

I don’t personally want to run a large open source project, so I’m not looking for contributions at this time.

Install

The executable can be built using make, assuming you have the Go language toolchain installed. Prebuilt binaries are currently available on npm under separate packages:

npm install -g esbuild-linux-64   # for Linux
npm install -g esbuild-darwin-64  # for macOS
npm install -g esbuild-windows-64 # for Windows
npm install -g esbuild-wasm       # for all other platforms

This adds a command called esbuild.

Usage

The command-line interface takes a list of entry points and produces one bundle file per entry point. Here are the available options:

Usage:
  esbuild [options] [entry points]

Options:
  --name=...            The name of the module
  --bundle              Bundle all dependencies into the output files
  --outfile=...         The output file (for one entry point)
  --outdir=...          The output directory (for multiple entry points)
  --sourcemap           Emit a source map
  --error-limit=...     Maximum error count or 0 to disable (default 10)
  --target=...          Language target (default esnext)

  --minify              Sets all --minify-* flags
  --minify-whitespace   Remove whitespace
  --minify-identifiers  Shorten identifiers
  --minify-syntax       Use equivalent but shorter syntax

  --define:K=V          Substitute K with V while parsing
  --jsx-factory=...     What to use instead of React.createElement
  --jsx-fragment=...    What to use instead of React.Fragment

  --trace=...           Write a CPU trace to this file
  --cpuprofile=...      Write a CPU profile to this file

Example:
  # Produces dist/entry_point.js and dist/entry_point.js.map
  esbuild --bundle entry_point.js --outdir=dist --minify --sourcemap

Using with React

To use esbuild with React:

• Make sure all JSX syntax is put in .jsx files instead of .js files because esbuild uses the file extension to determine what syntax to parse.

• If you’re using TypeScript, run tsc first to convert .tsx files into either .jsx or .js files.

• If you’re using esbuild to bundle React yourself instead of including it with a <script> tag in your HTML, you’ll need to pass '--define:process.env.NODE_ENV="development"' or '--define:process.env.NODE_ENV="production"' to esbuild on the command line.

• If you’re using Preact instead of React, you’ll also need to pass --jsx-factory=preact.h --jsx-fragment=preact.Fragment to esbuild on the command line.

For example, if you have a file called example.jsx with the following contents:

import * as React from 'react'
import * as ReactDOM from 'react-dom'

ReactDOM.render(
  <h1>Hello, world!</h1>,
  document.getElementById('root')
);

Use this for a development build:

esbuild example.jsx --bundle '--define:process.env.NODE_ENV="development"' --outfile=out.js

Use this for a production build:

esbuild example.jsx --bundle '--define:process.env.NODE_ENV="production"' --minify --outfile=out.js