How to not minify already minified on each "grunt build" in yeoman

Long title, yeah.

Let's speed-up Grunt a little

In some of my projects I use yeoman (generator-angular), and on each "grunt build" Grunt runs minification of all JS files from the 'vendor' list (and from 'scripts' also, but it's not a problem).

It takes a long time, especially if you use a lot of external modules.

But most of them already have minified versions, so why to waste a time to minify them again?

I've made Grunt to skip minification of 'vendor' block and it decreased time of 'grunt build' execution in 5 times.

But it wasn't easy (that's why I decided to write this article).

You can't just ask usemin to skip 'vendor', but you can ignore configuration, made by usemin for uglify. To do this, add 'onlyScripts' target to your uglify task:

    uglify:        {

      onlyScripts: {

        files:   [{

          dest: '<%= yeoman.dist %>/scripts/scripts.js',

          src:  ['.tmp/concat/scripts/scripts.js']

        }]

      }

    }

Also, now uglify will not copy your vendor.js from temporary folder, so add "vendorJS" section to "copy" task:

copy:

      //...

      vendorJS: {

        expand: true,

        cwd:    '.tmp/concat/scripts/',

        dest:   '<%= yeoman.dist %>/scripts/',

        src:    'vendor.js'

      }

Then, in "build" task, set target of uglify to 'onlyScripts' and copy vendor.js:

  grunt.registerTask('build', [

    'jshint',

    'clean:dist',

    //'wiredep',

    // ...

    'useminPrepare',

    //'concurrent:dist',

    'autoprefixer',

    'concat',

    'ngAnnotate',

    'copy:dist',

    'cssmin',

    'uglify:onlyScripts',

    'copy:vendorJS',

   // ...

  ]);

About commented out lines:

 "wiredep" - this task will replace all .min.js-links (in "vendors" block) to .js-links. We don't want to allow it (otherwise our vendor.js will be huge non-minified file).

 "concurrent:dist" - when this task is commented out, Grunt works much faster on MBP with 2 cores. I don't know why. Try it, maybe it will help you too.