PurgeCSS

What is PurgeCSS?

When you are building a website, chances are that you are using a css framework like Bootstrap, Materializecss, Foundation, etc... But you will only use a small set of the framework and a lot of unused css styles will be included.

This is where PurgeCSS comes into play. PurgeCSS analyzes your content and your css files. Then it matches the selectors used in your css files with the ones in your content files. It removes unused selectors from your css, resulting in smaller css files.

You can try PurgeCSS online at purgecss.full-human.com.

Sponsors 🥰

Documentation

You can find the PurgeCSS documentation on this website.

Table of Contents

PurgeCSS

• Configuration
• Command Line Interface
• Programmatic API
• Safelisting
• Extractors
• Comparison

Plugins

• PostCSS
• Webpack
• Gulp
• Grunt
• Gatsby

Guides

• Vue.js
• Nuxt.js
• React.js
• Next.js
• Razzle
• Hugo

Getting Started

Installation

PurgeCSS requires Node.js 22.12 or later.

npm install purgecss --save-dev

Usage

import { PurgeCSS } from "purgecss";
const purgeCSSResults = await new PurgeCSS().purge({
  content: ["**/*.html"],
  css: ["**/*.css"],
});

Packages

This repository is a monorepo that we manage using pnpm workspaces and Changesets. That means that we actually publish several packages to npm from the same codebase, including:

Package	Version	Description
purgecss		The core of PurgeCSS
postcss-purgecss		PostCSS plugin for PurgeCSS
purgecss-webpack-plugin		Webpack plugin for PurgeCSS
gulp-purgecss		Gulp plugin for PurgeCSS
grunt-purgecss		Grunt plugin for PurgeCSS
rollup-plugin-purgecss		Rollup plugin for PurgeCSS
purgecss-from-html		Html extractor for PurgeCSS
purgecss-from-pug		Pug extractor for PurgeCSS
purgecss-with-wordpress		Collection of safelist items for WordPress
vue-cli-plugin-purgecss		Vue CLI Plugin for PurgeCSS