Closure Compiler Webservice Turndown - 2025

[lauraharker]

The Closure Compiler maintainers have chosen to stop investing in the webservice at https://closure-compiler.appspot.com/. If you do not use this webservice, you can stop reading - this does not affect users of Closure Compiler via the GitHub source, Maven, or NPM.

Why?

• The webservice is limited in its capabilities. The UI version in particular only accepts a single JS file.
• The webservice was initially intended for debugging and reproducing problems, but this utility has diminished now that most users consume Closure Compiler via either the NPM or Maven distributions, which have a very different API. This has caused confusion in the past where the default webservice behavior does not align with the defaults for other versions.
• The closure-compiler developers are focused on compiler work. We don't have extra time to spend on keeping web services up to date and functioning.

Alternatives

Closure Compiler may still be run locally. See https://github.com/google/closure-compiler?tab=readme-ov-file#getting-started.

Timeline

We will first engage in planned outages of the UI then turndown the UI. Then we will repeat planned outages for the API, turndown the API, and completely turn off closure-compiler.appspot.com.

This timeline is still tentative and we may extend the deadlines.

UI planned outages:

• 2024-12-03, 6AM PST to 6PM PST (12 hours)
• 2024-12-04, 6PM PST to 2024-12-05, 6AM PST (12 hours)
• 2024-12-11, 9AM PST to 2024-12-12, 9AM PST (24 hours)

UI final turndown:

• Scheduled for: 2025-01-13

API planned outages:

• 2025-01-13, 6AM PST to 6PM PST (12 hours)
• 2025-01-14, 6PM PST to 2024-01-15, 6AM PST (12 hours)
• 2025-01-28, 10AM PST to 2025-01-29 10AM PST (24 hours)
• 2025-02-11, 10AM PST to 2025-02-13 10AM PST (48 hours)

API final turndown:

• 2025-03-03

We'll monitor this issue for any concerns. I'll send an announcement to closure-compiler-discuss with more details soon.

[worldoptimizer]

You will be missed 😢

[jplevene]

Hi Laura,

The reasons you are shutting it down are the reasons it is so usefull :-(.
We use it for single file compression and checking JS, and it is far easier and quicker to use than the command line.
We would be more than happy to host and maintain it on our App Engine account if we could get the code.

[worldoptimizer]

If it doesn't cause too much trouble, keeping it alive would be greatly appreciated by a small but dedicated community of casual users!

[sidddev7]

Hi @lauraharker ,
Using this compiler is really beneficial for users like us, we request for leaving this project live longer, or allow us to host it on our own
Thankyou