For best performance, it is recommended that you minify the Javascript and CSS that your web application uses.  What this involves is removing all unnecessary whitespace and comments.  So, for example, the following CSS:

body
{
  margin: 5px 10px 10px 10px;
  font-family: arial;
}

would look like this after being minified:

body{margin:5px 10px 10px 10px;font-family:arial;}

And similarly for Javascript. It is common to configure your server to perform GZip compression on files that it serves, including Javascript and CSS, and this can significantly reduce the time that it takes for browsers to load your pages. But minification when used with GZip usually helps to compress the files just a little bit further. And unlike GZip, which only compresses the file only as it is sent over the internet, minification compresses the file as it is seen by a browser. This allows the browser to parse it faster; additionally, smaller files are more likely to be cached by the browser.

It is common to manually minify your Javascript and CSS as part of deploying your application, saving a minified copy on your server either manually or as part of an automatic deployment script. But it is also possible to create custom Apache output filters to perform the minification for you. This gives you the best of both worlds — you can edit your files directly without their being minified, but you don’t have to engineer a minification process for when you deploy your application. Here’s how to do it, first for Javascript and then for CSS.

Javascript

1. Ensure you have the Apache mod_ext_filter extension installed.

2. Download the jsmin.py Python script from Douglas Crockford’s website. (There are also other languages available.)  Save it in your Python installation’s site-packages folder (possibly /usr/lib/python2.x/site-packages/).

3. Add the following lines to your main Apache config file (httpd.conf, apache2.conf, etc.):

   <IfModule mod_ext_filter.c>
     ExtFilterDefine jsmin 
                     mode=output 
                     intype=application/x-javascript 
                     outtype=application/x-javascript 
                     cmd="/usr/bin/python /usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/jsmin.py"
   </IfModule>
   

4. Add the following statement to the context where you would like to minify your Javascript files (you can place this in your server config, but also within a virtual host configuration, a directory directive, or even a .htaccess file if FileInfo overrides are allowed):

   AddOutputFilter jsmin js
   

   This will cause all files with extensions ending in .js to be run through the Javascript minify filter before being sent to a browser. If you have some Javascript without the .js extension, you can add additional extensions, or you can use the AddOutputFilterByType directive instead to apply the filter to any content with the application/javascript MIME type. With appropriate mod_expires directives you can cause these files to be cached for a long time by browsers, thereby ensuring that the minify filter is not run more than necessary.

For debugging purposes you should ensure that the minify filter is applied only to your production server and not to your development server. Until you have verified the correctness of your Javascript it will be harder to locate Javascript errors within minified code!

CSS

1. Ensure you have the Apache mod_ext_filter extension installed, as above.

2. Install the cssmin Ruby gem:

   gem install cssmin

3. Add the following lines to your main Apache config file (httpd.conf, apache2.conf, etc.):

   <IfModule mod_ext_filter.c>
     ExtFilterDefine cssmin 
                     mode=output 
                     intype=text/css 
                     outtype=text/css 
                     cmd="/usr/bin/ruby -e 'require "rubygems"; require "cssmin"; puts CSSMin.minify(STDIN)'"
   </IfModule>
   

4. Add the following statement to the context where you would like to minify your CSS files (you can place this in your server config, but also within a virtual host configuration, a directory directive, or even a .htaccess file if FileInfo overrides are allowed):

   AddOutputFilter cssmin css
   

   This will cause all files with extensions ending in .css to be run through the CSS minify filter before being sent to a browser. If you have some CSS without the .css extension, you can add additional extensions, or you can use the AddOutputFilterByType directive instead to apply the filter to any content with the text/css MIME type. With appropriate mod_expires directives you can cause these files to be cached for a long time by browsers, thereby ensuring that the minify filter is not run more than necessary.