Posts tagged JavaScript
How to minify websites with GitHub Actions
- 12 April 2023
Websites are usually made up of HTML, CSS, and Javascript. These files are usually not minified, which means that they are not compressed. This means that the files are not optimized for the web. This can cause the website to load slower than it should. This is especially true for mobile users. This is where minification comes in. Minification is the process of removing unnecessary characters from the files. This can include removing comments, removing whitespace, and removing unnecessary characters. This can make the website load faster and more efficiently.
Multiple ways to minify these files do exist. One way is to use a minifier online. Another way is to use a minifier locally on your computer, but both of these methods are not ideal. A more efficient way is to use a GitHub Action. This is a way to automate tasks on GitHub. This can be used to minify these files before creating an artifact and deploying this artifact to the web.
Subresource Integrity for JavaScript
- 23 April 2017
Including JavaScript files from a CDN can be beneficial in many ways as you don’t have to ship the code with your code and caching can be done by the browser of a proxy server. It also allows for injecting untrusted code into a web page as someone else is hosting the code you rely on. But Firefox, Chrome, and Opera already support Subresource Integrity checking script and link tags. Hopefully, both Safari and Edge (or Internet Explorer) will support it soon.
But how does it work? First, let’s calculate the SHA256 hash of JQuery version 3.2.1 hosted by Cloudflare. Also, keep in mind to verify this number with the official version offered by JQuery. In this example, we download the minimized version of JQuery with curl and run it twice through OpenSSL to generate the checksum and encode the result in base64 format.