Anyhow to remove "comments" in minified js?

[josteph]

Using ESBuildMinifyPlugin, is there anyway to remove the comments in the minified js file?

For example:

If using terser, we can add easily using comments: false in the output options.

[privatenumber]

This is by design on esbuild's end:

And all comments other than license-related comments are stripped out by esbuild anyway.

Can you open an issue here?

I think minification-benchmarks can also benefit from a more nuanced control over removing comments as other minifiers support it.

[josteph]

Thanks for the reference 👍

Edit:
I believe it has been answered here evanw/esbuild#578

[privatenumber]

I would still open a feature request about having granular control over whether license comments should be kept. Some authors might be referencing licenses in a separate file instead of the JS code.

Since esbuild preserves @license comments, you can try removing it to trick esbuild into thinking it's an ordinary comment.

As an example, you can use code-inject-loader to accomplish this:

{
	loader: 'code-inject-loader',
	options: {
		transform: src => src.replace(/@license/, '')
	}
},
{
	loader: 'esbuild-loader',
	...
}

Note that this is risky because it doesn't guarantee that @license is used as a part of a comment.

[privatenumber]

Re-opening as esbuild v0.11.15 has an option to remove comments.