ChannelZ

ChannelZ is a CLI tool for x86-64 Linux machines that simplifies the common task of encoding static web assets with Gzip and Brotli for production environments.

Features

• gzip and brotli are compiled into channelz; their binaries do not need to be separately installed;
• The maximum compression settings are applied; the end results will often be smaller than running native gzip or brotli thanks to various optimizations;
• It can be set against one or many files, one or many directories;
• Paths can be specified as trailing command arguments, and/or loaded via text file (with one path per line) with the -l option;
• Directory processing is recursive;
• Processing is done in parallel with multiple threads for major speedups;
• Appropriate file types are automatically targeted; no thinking involved!

The "appropriate" file types are:

• css
• eot
• htm(l)
• ico
• js
• json
• mjs
• otf
• rss
• svg
• ttf
• txt
• xhtm(l)
• xml
• xsl

Installation

Debian and Ubuntu users can grab the pre-built .deb package from the release page.

This application is written in Rust and can alternatively be built from source using Cargo:

# Clone the source.
git clone https://github.com/Blobfolio/channelz.git

# Go to it.
cd channelz

# Build as usual. Specify additional flags as desired.
cargo build \
    --bin channelz \
    --release

(This should work under other 64-bit Unix environments too, like MacOS.)

Usage

It's easy. Just run channelz [FLAGS] [OPTIONS] <PATH(S)>….

The following flags and options are available:

    --clean          Remove all existing *.gz *.br files before starting.
-h, --help           Prints help information
-l, --list <list>    Read file paths from this list.
-p, --progress       Show progress bar while minifying.
-V, --version        Prints version information

For example:

# Generate app.js.gz and app.js.br:
channelz /path/to/app.js

# Tackle a whole folder at once with a nice progress bar:
channelz -p /path/to/assets

# Do the same thing, but clear out any old *.gz or *.br files first:
channelz --clean -p /path/to/assets

# Or load it up with a lot of places separately:
channelz /path/to/css /path/to/js …

Benchmarks

ChannelZ's compression is a little bit stronger than brotli -q 11 and gzip -9, but not by much.

Timing-wise, though, it's no competition. :)