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:

• appcache
• atom
• bmp
• css
• csv
• doc(x)
• eot
• geojson
• htc
• htm(l)
• ico
• ics
• js
• json
• jsonld
• (web)manifest
• md
• mjs
• otf
• pdf
• rdf
• rss
• svg
• ttf
• txt
• vcard
• vcs
• vtt
• wasm
• xhtm(l)
• xls(x)
• xml
• xsl
• y(a)ml

Installation

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

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:

Short	Long	Value	Description
	--clean		Remove all existing *.br *.gz files before starting.
	--clean-only		Same as --clean, but exit immediately afterward.
	--force		Try to encode all files regardless of file extension, except those already ending in .br/.gz.
-h	--help		Print help information and exit.
-l	--list	<FILE>	Read (absolute) file and/or directory paths to compress from this text file — or STDIN if "-" — one entry per line, instead of or in addition to <PATH(S)>.
	--no-br		Skip Brotli encoding.
	--no-gz		Skip Gzip encoding.
-p	--progress		Show progress bar while minifying.
-V	--version		Print program version and exit.

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

These benchmarks were performed on a Intel® Core™ i7-10610U with four discrete cores, averaging 100 runs.

Test:  ChannelZ Documentation
Files: 35/47
Size:  226,456 bytes (encodable)

Program	Time (ms)	GZ (b)	BR (b)
ChannelZ	1,050	66,394	55,099
Find + Gzip + Brotli	3,212	68,946	55,246

Test:  WordPress Core
Files: 815/1,980
Size:  43,988,358 bytes (encodable)

Program	Time (s)	GZ (b)	BR (b)
ChannelZ	10.5045	7,539,948	6,522,810
Find + Gzip + Brotli	43.9917	7,856,120	6,557,240