Build instructions

This page describes how to compile three.js into a compressed Javascript file.

Quickstart

• Install Node.js.

• Clone repository, use --depth parameter to prevent fetching all commit history. Also you can just download and unzip folder.

git clone --depth=30 https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js.git

• Go into the three.js directory.

cd ./three.js

• Install build dependencies

npm install

• Run the build script.

npm run build

The build file is at build/three.module.js, with three.js being the UMD version.

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Other builds:

• npm run build: Concatenation only, no compression.
• npm run build-closure: Compile using the Google Closure Compiler producing build/three.min.js.
• npm run dev: Watches the files in 'src' folder and automatically concatenate (npm run build) when source files are changed

Why compression?

The source code of Three.js is deliberately easy to read. This means that it's split into several files and classes. While that's great for developing and hacking on Three.js, it's not that great when deploying code to the production server.

In production, you want to

• use the least amount of files possible (to minimize the number of connections to your server)
• transmit as few bytes as possible (to save on bandwidth and on wait-time on both sides)

So how do we put all files into just one and make it smaller than the sum of the parts? Well, the answer is the awesome combination of our build script plus Javascript compressors!