medico-mind/rolldown-compression

rolldown-compression is a plugin for Rolldown, a JavaScript bundler, and for Vite 8 and later, which uses Rolldown under the hood. When you build a web project, this plugin automatically compresses the output files with gzip, brotli, and zstd, three common compression formats used to shrink files before serving them to browsers. The actual compression work is done by native Rust code rather than JavaScript, using a technique that sends one batched request across the language boundary per build and spreads the work across every CPU core, so the compression happens without blocking the rest of the build process. The README highlights a real project where switching from the standard Node.js zlib-based compression to this plugin cut total build time from four minutes thirty four seconds down to one minute eight seconds, while making much better use of available CPU cores. A recent version also added compiler-level optimizations to the native binaries that further reduce compression time in some cases. Installing it is a normal npm install, and prebuilt binaries come with the package so no one needs a Rust toolchain to use it. In a Rolldown or Vite configuration file, you import the plugin and add it to your plugins list, with sensible defaults of gzip and brotli compression out of the box. It can be configured in detail: which file types to include or exclude, a minimum file size before compression kicks in, which specific algorithms and quality levels to use, how the compressed files are named, whether to delete the uncompressed originals, and how many CPU threads to use. For Vite users, the plugin only runs during production builds and leaves the development server untouched. Projects on Vite 6 or 7 can use it through the separate rolldown-vite package that provides the Rolldown-based build system early. The plugin's options are validated as soon as it's set up, so mistakes like an invalid compression level are caught immediately rather than partway through a build. Under the hood, the plugin works while build output is still in memory, sending eligible files to the native compression code in one batch and emitting the results, with work scheduled so that one large file being compressed with the slowest, highest quality brotli setting doesn't hold up the whole batch.