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 --recurse-submodules 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 .gz .br 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)>`.
`-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

Blobfolio/channelz

ChannelZ

Features

Installation

Usage

Benchmarks

License