A TypeScript custom transformer which minify names of private class members.

For now it just renames private members with prepending some prefix to name. For example, if you have privateMember, then after transformation the name will be _private_privateMember. After that you can use terser/uglify with mangle options to minify that members. Note, that private class members with decorators won't be prefixed and further minified.

Before start using this transformer in the production, I strongly recommend you check that your code compiles successfully and all files has correct output. I would say check the whole project file-by-file and compare the input with the (expected) output.

I cannot guarantee you that the transformer covers all possible cases, but it has tests for the most popular ones, and if you catch a bug - please feel free to create an issue.

I've tested it for several projects and it works well.

TypeScript >= 2.9.1

Default: _private_

The prefix which will be added to private member's name.

Unfortunately, TypeScript itself does not currently provide any easy way to use custom transformers (see microsoft/TypeScript#14419). The followings are the example usage of the custom transformer.

// webpack.config.js
const minifyPrivatesTransformer = require('ts-transformer-minify-privates').default;

module.exports = {
  // ...
  module: {
    rules: [
      {
        test: /\.ts$/,
        loader: 'ts-loader', // or 'awesome-typescript-loader'
        options: {
          getCustomTransformers: program => ({
              before: [
                  minifyPrivatesTransformer(program)
              ]
          })
        }
      }
    ]
  }
};

// rollup.config.js
import typescript from 'rollup-plugin-typescript2';
import minifyPrivatesTransformer from 'ts-transformer-minify-privates';

export default {
  // ...
  plugins: [
    typescript({ transformers: [service => ({
      before: [ minifyPrivatesTransformer(service.getProgram()) ],
      after: []
    })] })
  ]
};

See ttypescript's README for how to use this with module bundlers such as webpack or Rollup.

// tsconfig.json
{
  "compilerOptions": {
    // ...
    "plugins": [
      { "transform": "ts-transformer-minify-privates" }
    ]
  },
  // ...
}

I've tested the transformer on lightweight-charts and the bundle size was reduced:

• on ~15% min (from 186KB to 157KB)
• on ~5% min.gz (from 43KB to 41KB)