Grunt tasks to minify SVG using SVGO

SVG files, especially exported from various editors, usually contains a lot of redundant and useless information such as editor metadata, comments, hidden elements, default or non-optimal values and other stuff that can be safely removed or converted without affecting SVG rendering result.

If you haven't used grunt before, be sure to check out the Getting Started guide, as it explains how to create a gruntfile as well as install and use grunt plugins. Once you're familiar with that process, install this plugin with this command:

npm install --save-dev grunt-svgmin

Once the plugin has been installed, it may be enabled inside your Gruntfile with this line of JavaScript:

grunt.loadNpmTasks('grunt-svgmin');

Tip: the load-grunt-tasks module makes it easier to load multiple grunt tasks.

See the Gruntfile in this repo for a full example.

grunt.initConfig({
	svgmin: {											// Task
		options: {										// Configuration that will be passed directly to SVGO
			plugins: [
			  { removeViewBox: false },
			  { removeUselessStrokeAndFill: false }
			]
		},
		dist: {											// Target
			files: {									// Dictionary of files
				'dist/figure.svg': 'app/figure.svg'		// 'destination': 'source'
			}
		}
	}
});

grunt.loadNpmTasks('grunt-svgmin');
grunt.registerTask('default', ['svgmin']);

grunt.initConfig({
	svgmin: {						// Task
		options: {					// Configuration that will be passed directly to SVGO
			plugins: [
			  { removeViewBox: false },
			  { removeUselessStrokeAndFill: false }
			]
		},
		dist: {						// Target
			files: [{				// Dictionary of files
				expand: true,		// Enable dynamic expansion.
				cwd: 'img/src',		// Src matches are relative to this path.
				src: ['**/*.svg'],	// Actual pattern(s) to match.
				dest: 'img/',		// Destination path prefix.
				ext: '.min.svg'		// Dest filepaths will have this extension.
				// ie: optimise img/src/branding/logo.svg and store it in img/branding/logo.min.svg
			}]
		}
});

grunt.loadNpmTasks('grunt-svgmin');
grunt.registerTask('default', ['svgmin']);

svgmin makes use of the standard SVGO plugin architecture. Therefore, to customize SVG optimisation, you can disable/enable any SVGO plugins listed at the SVGO repository.

To disable plugins with the Gruntfile.js, look for the plugin name at the SVGO repository and copy the plugin name (minus the file extension). Then set its value in the JSON to false in comma-separated objects. To exemplify, here is how the plugins section in the example configuration (illustrated above) might be written with some of the standard SVGO plugins disabled:

plugins: [
	{ removeViewBox: false }, 				// don't remove the viewbox atribute from the SVG
	{ removeUselessStrokeAndFill: false },	// don't remove Useless Strokes and Fills
	{ removeEmptyAttrs: false }				// don't remove Empty Attributes from the SVG
}]

Check each plugin for exports.active = [true/false] to see if the plugin is enabled. Most of the plugins are enabled by default but you may want to prevent a couple, particularly removeUselessStrokeAndFill as that may remove small details with subtracted / extruded complex paths.

MIT © Sindre Sorhus