LaraOutPress

Compress your Laravel application's HTML/JS output before it hits the wire — zero controller changes required.

LaraOutPress is a single after middleware. It sits at the end of the pipeline, strips unnecessary whitespace and comments out of your rendered HTML response, does a light pass of inline JavaScript minification, and hands the browser a smaller payload — with zero changes to your controllers, views, or routes.

Installation

composer require vrkansagara/lara-out-press

Laravel's package auto-discovery registers the service provider and facade for you. If your app has auto-discovery disabled, add the provider manually in bootstrap/providers.php (Laravel 11+) or config/app.php (Laravel ≤10):

Vrkansagara\LaraOutPress\ServiceProvider::class,

Publish the config file so you can override the defaults:

php artisan vendor:publish --provider="Vrkansagara\LaraOutPress\ServiceProvider"

This creates config/laraoutpress.php in your app.

"Unable to locate class or alias" when running vendor:publish? That means Composer never registered the package in this app. Check, in order:

1. composer show vrkansagara/lara-out-press — confirms it's actually installed (not just listed in composer.json).
2. It's under require, not require-dev, if you run composer install --no-dev anywhere (CI, production deploys).
3. Re-run composer dump-autoload after installing — discovery is regenerated at that point.
4. Clear stale discovery caches: php artisan package:discover — or delete bootstrap/cache/packages.php and bootstrap/cache/services.php and let Laravel rebuild them.

Configuration

Every setting is controlled through environment variables, with config/laraoutpress.php as the published override point.

| Env variable | Config key | Default | Purpose | |--------------------------------------|------------------------|---------|-------------------------------------------------------------| | VRKANSAGARA_COMPRESS_ENABLED | enabled | false | Master on/off switch. Must be a real boolean. | | VRKANSAGARA_COMPRESS_DEBUG | debug | false | Appends a before/after/percent-saved banner to every page. | | VRKANSAGARA_COMPRESS_ENVIRONMENT | target_environment | '' | Comma-separated list of environments compression runs in. | | (config only) | exclude_routes | ['api/*'] | Route patterns (as passed to Request::is()) that are never compressed. |

Enable it

VRKANSAGARA_COMPRESS_ENABLED=true

Only the literal boolean true enables the middleware. Anything else — an empty string, "1", a stray typo — is treated as false on purpose, so a misconfigured value fails safe instead of silently compressing (or not compressing) unexpectedly.

Choose which environment(s) it runs in

# Single environment
VRKANSAGARA_COMPRESS_ENVIRONMENT=production

# Multiple environments
VRKANSAGARA_COMPRESS_ENVIRONMENT=production,staging,local

Don't reference ${APP_ENV} in your .env file. A line like VRKANSAGARA_COMPRESS_ENVIRONMENT="${APP_ENV}" looks natural (avoid repeating the value), but plain .env files are parsed by vlucas/phpdotenv, which does not expand ${VAR} references the way a shell or Docker Compose does. You'd get the literal 10-character string ${APP_ENV} instead of local — and compression would silently never activate. Write the actual environment name.

As a safety net, LaraOutPress falls back to the app's current environment whenever target_environment is left empty or still contains an unresolved ${...} placeholder, so this mistake now fails safe rather than silently.

See the impact on every page

VRKANSAGARA_COMPRESS_DEBUG=true

Appends a fixed banner to the bottom of every compressed page showing the response size before and after compression, and the percentage saved. Turn this off in production — it's a development/staging aid, not a user-facing feature.

Exclude routes

Compression is skipped automatically for JSON responses ($request->expectsJson()) and for any route matching a pattern in exclude_routes (published in config/laraoutpress.php, matched via Laravel's Request::is()):

// config/laraoutpress.php
'exclude_routes' => [
    'api/*',
    'webhooks/*',
],

Which .env file actually applies?

Laravel only loads one .env file per request by default — the plain .env at your project root — regardless of how many environment-specific files (.env.local, .env.production, .env.dusk.local, …) sit next to it. Those extra files are conventions from other tools (Vite, Dusk, deployment scripts) and are not read by Laravel/vlucas/phpdotenv automatically unless your app explicitly opts in via $app->loadEnvironmentFrom(...) or the --env artisan flag.

In practice, that means:

• If you have both .env and .env.production and you deploy without changing how the app boots, .env wins — .env.production is inert dead weight.

• APP_ENV itself is read from .env, so it can't be used to choose which .env file loads unless something upstream (your deploy pipeline, php artisan serve --env=, a custom bootstrapper) sets APP_ENV before Laravel boots and points it at a different file.

• When in doubt, dump what Laravel actually resolved instead of guessing from the file list:

  php artisan tinker --execute="echo app()->environment();"
  

If your deployment relies on multiple .env.* files being auto-selected, that selection logic lives in your own bootstrap/app.php / deployment tooling, not in Laravel core or in this package — make sure VRKANSAGARA_COMPRESS_* variables are set in whichever file actually gets loaded for that environment.

What gets touched

• HTML whitespace between tags is collapsed.
• HTML comments (<!-- ... -->) are stripped.
• Inline <script> content goes through a light JS-comment/whitespace minifier.
• JSON responses, excluded routes, and non-matching environments are always passed through untouched.

Development

composer install
composer run-script test      # PHPUnit
composer run-script cs-check  # PHP_CodeSniffer

CI runs the full suite across PHP 8.2, 8.3, and 8.4 on every push and pull request.

Contributing

Issues and pull requests are very welcome — see SECURITY.md for how to report a vulnerability privately.

Made with :heart: in India