How to Create a Laravel CSS-Minify Command

In this article you’ll learn how to use Laravel’s Artisan command line tool, and how to create a customized command. Note that you need to be familiar with the Laravel framework to get the most of this article.

What are we building

In this tutorial we’re going to build a command to minify our css assets, which will be used like this:

cssmin 'output_path' 'file1'...'fileN' --comments --concat 

• output_path: (required) path to save the minified files, (style.css -> style.min.css).


• file1 ... fileN: (required) list of files to minify.


• --comments: (optional) add this option to keep comments.


• --concat: (optional) concatenate the minified files into one file called all.min.css.

What is a Laravel Command

Artisan is the name of the command line utility in Laravel. It comes with a set of predefined commands, which you can list with php artisan list. If you want to show the help for a specific command, you can use php artisan help command.

Creating the Css Minifier Command

To create an artisan command, you can use the command:make command. This command accepts one argument:

• name: the class name for the command.

and three options:

• --command: the name that should be typed to run the command.


• --path: by default the commands are stored within the app/commands folder, however, you can change that with this option.


• --namespace: you can use this option to namespace your set of commands, e.g. in the command command:make, the make command is under the command namespace.

Now, to create our command we will use php artisan command:make CssMinCommand --command=cssminwhich will create a CssMinCommand.php file within our app/commands directory.

use Illuminate\Console\Command;
use Symfony\Component\Console\Input\InputOption;
use Symfony\Component\Console\Input\InputArgument;

class CssminCommand extends Command{
    protected $name = 'cssmin';
    protected $description = 'Command description.';

    public function __construct(){
        parent::__construct();
    }

    public function fire(){
        //
    }

    protected function getArguments(){
        return array(
            array('example', 

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