README

laravel-blade-minify-plus is a lightweight package for Laravel 8 through 12 that minifies the final HTML produced by your Blade templates. Minified HTML reduces response sizes, improves the effectiveness of gzip compression and can deliver a small performance boost to your users without having to change your views. The underlying voku/html‑min library removes extra whitespace, comments and other unneeded characters without breaking the content structure. The result is cleaner HTML that is safe for dynamic pages and SEO.

Installation

Install the package via Composer:

composer require shemshad/laravel-blade-minify-plus

The service provider is auto‑discovered by Laravel. If you are not using package discovery you can register it manually in your config/app.php file:

'providers' => [
    // ...
    BladeMinifyPlus\BladeMinifyPlusServiceProvider::class,
],

Version Compatibility & Middleware Registration

This package provides a MinifyHtmlMiddleware. How you register and use it depends on your Laravel version.

Laravel 10 (and earlier)

Register an alias in app/Http/Kernel.php (in newer Laravel 10 apps the property is called $middlewareAliases; older apps may still use $routeMiddleware):

// app/Http/Kernel.php
protected $middlewareAliases = [
    // ...
    'minify' => \BladeMinifyPlus\Middleware\MinifyHtmlMiddleware::class,
];

Configuration

Publish the configuration file to customize the behaviour:

php artisan vendor:publish --tag=blade-minify-plus-config

This will create a config/blade-minify-plus.php file where you can adjust the following options:

Key	Description
`enabled`	Enable or disable minification globally.
`skip_routes`	Array of named routes that should not be minified. Useful for APIs or routes that render JSON/XML.
`options`	A map of booleans corresponding to the methods exposed by `voku\HtmlMin`. These options allow you to fine‑tune the minification process. For example, `doRemoveComments` controls whether HTML comments are stripped and `doRemoveWhitespaceAroundTags` removes unnecessary whitespace between tags.

The default options are conservative; many of the more aggressive transformations are disabled by default to avoid breaking pages. You can experiment with enabling them if you wish to squeeze out a few more bytes.

Usage

Route middleware

The package registers a middleware alias named minify. You can apply minification to a specific route or group:

Route::get('/about', function () {
    return view('about');
})->middleware('minify');

Route::middleware(['minify'])->group(function () {
    Route::view('/', 'welcome');
    Route::view('/contact', 'contact');
});

Global middleware (optional)

If you wish to enable minification for all web routes, add the MinifyHtmlMiddleware to the web middleware group in your app/Http/Kernel.php:

protected $middlewareGroups = [
    'web' => [
        // ... existing middleware ...
        \BladeMinifyPlus\Middleware\MinifyHtmlMiddleware::class,
    ],
];

Alternatively you can uncomment the pushMiddlewareToGroup call in BladeMinifyPlusServiceProvider to automatically append the middleware to the web group whenever the package is enabled.

Skipping minification

Some pages—such as ones that return JSON, serve files, or use complex JavaScript frameworks—may not benefit from HTML minification. You can exclude them in two ways:

Set the skip_routes array in the configuration to the names of the routes you wish to ignore.
Disable minification on a per‑route basis by simply omitting the minify middleware from that route or group.

How it works

When a request is processed, the MinifyHtmlMiddleware inspects the response. If the response is HTML, the middleware passes the content through a configured HtmlMinifier instance which uses the voku/html‑min library to optimise it. Non‑HTML responses (JSON, XML, binary files) and routes listed in skip_routes are left untouched. The minifier supports a rich set of flags that control how aggressively optimisation should be applied. By default only safe optimisations such as removing comments and compressing excess whitespace are enabled.

Laravel’s own HTMLMin\HTMLMin package warns that forcing optimisations can be dangerous and recommends enabling them only when you understand the implications. With Blade‑Minify‑Plus you remain in control: minification is opt‑in via middleware and each option can be tuned to your needs.

Testing

To ensure minification isn’t silently breaking pages, you can write feature tests that assert your views still contain expected strings. You may also dump the response body locally and visually inspect it before enabling minification in production. Remember to clear your view cache whenever changing Blade templates:

php artisan view:clear

Compatibility

This package supports Laravel versions 8.x through 12.x. It requires PHP 8.1 or newer. Because it relies on Laravel’s middleware stack, it does not need to touch the Blade compiler and thus remains forward compatible with future releases.

Security and contribution

If you discover a security vulnerability, please open an issue or submit a pull request. Contributions are welcome; feel free to file issues or pull requests to improve the package.

License

Blade‑Minify‑Plus is open‑source software licensed under the MIT license.

shemshad / laravel-blade-minify-plus

Maintainers

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