Jekyll and UnCSS

Jekyll is a great tool for building static sites, however, I often see many projects that are including a lot of unused CSS. Since Jekyll generates an entire working site in the _site directory, we can use it to run uncss . Below outlines an example project using uncss and a build.js script.

Note: this assumes you have node and npm installed.

Setting up the project

Firstly, let’s set up the project.

jekyll new uncss-example && cd uncss-example

And, add the uncss module.

npm init echo 'node_modules' >> .gitignore npm i --save uncss glob

Now add the following line to the _config.yml to exclude the node_modules in the jekyll build:

exclude: ['node_modules']

And modify the scripts object in your package.json to look like:

"scripts": { "uncss": "jekyll build && node build.js" },

Create the build script

build.js

var uncss = require('uncss') var glob = require('glob') var fs = require('fs') var stylesheetLocation = '_site/css/' var stylesheetSourceLocation = 'css/' var stylesheetName = 'main.css' var jekyllUncss = function () { var css = fs.readFileSync(stylesheetLocation + stylesheetName, 'utf8') glob('_site/**/*.html', function (err, files) { if (err) { console.log(err) } uncss( files, { raw: css, ignoreSheets: [/\/css\//] }, function (err, output) { if (err) { console.log(err) } fs.writeFileSync( stylesheetSourceLocation + 'un.' + stylesheetName, output ) } ) }) } jekyllUncss()

Then, run the task npm run uncss . The script above assumes the default jekyll CSS structure. If you’ve customized the CSS location, you will have to modify the stylesheetLocation , sourceStylesheetLocation and/or stylesheetName variables near the top of the script.

Also, I’ve opted to create a new CSS file from the uncss output that’s prefixed with un. and placed next to the source CSS file. This is intentional, allowing easy integration with Github pages since the new stylesheet will be available after a new jekyll build (allowing the uncss task to be run locally before deploying). However, we need to make sure the new stylesheet is being linked instead of the original, so modify the CSS link in _includes/head.html :

<link rel="stylesheet" href="{{ "/css/un.main.css" | prepend: site.baseurl }}">

Conclusion

That’s it. Now any unused CSS in main.css is removed in un.main.css and no longer linked in the built site. This will ensure the smallest possible stylesheet, decreasing download size for your site’s visitors.

For example, the default Jekyll CSS is 8.5KB. After running uncss, it’s now 5.1KB. That’s a 40% decrease.

Source code: https://github.com/e-x-a-m-p-l-e-s/jekyll-uncss-example