Is uglify-es still maintained?
No — uglify-es stopped being maintained around February 2018. terser is a community fork that picked uglify-es up and carried it on.
- Status
- No longer maintained
- Last maintained
- February 2018
- Use instead
terser— on npm- Succession
- Maintained fork
- Drop-in
- no — expect code changes
- Confidence
- high
Is there a maintained fork of uglify-es?
terser is a community fork that picked uglify-es up and carried it on. terser is not a drop-in replacement, so expect to change call sites.
How to migrate from uglify-es to terser
Terser accepts uglify-es options largely unchanged, so require('terser').minify(code, options) is close to a direct swap — but Terser 5's minify() is async and returns a promise, so call sites need updating.
Why uglify-es is on this list
uglify-es was the ES2015+ branch of UglifyJS and its releases stopped in early 2018; it is deprecated on npm, with the notice directing ES support back to uglify-js as of v3.13.0. Terser is a community fork of uglify-es that deliberately kept the option and CLI surface, and it became the default minifier for webpack and Rollup. Both destinations are live, but the ecosystem settled on terser.
The succession is settled: primary sources agree and the ecosystem has already moved.
uglify-es alternatives
Beyond the primary recommendation, these are credible for uglify-es's use case:
esbuild— view on npm@swc/core— view on npmuglify-js— view on npm
Check your own project for uglify-es
npx dead-deps --all --min-state unmaintainedRun that in the directory holding your lockfile. If uglify-es is anywhere in your tree — a direct dependency or buried under something else — it appears in the report with this verdict, this successor and the same evidence links, alongside anything else that has stopped moving. Nothing is uploaded; the scan reads your lockfile locally and queries public registry metadata.
Exit code 1 means something was flagged, which makes npx dead-deps --min-state deprecated usable as a CI gate. See how verdicts are produced.
Evidence
Every claim on this page traces to a primary source. Check them:
- npm deprecation notice for uglify-es (points ES support at uglify-js v3.13.0+)npmjs.com
- Terser README: terser is a fork of uglify-es, and "uglify-es is no longer maintained"github.com
- mishoo/UglifyJS2#3156 — the release-request thread Terser cites as evidence uglify-es is unmaintained (May 2018)github.com
Packages related to uglify-es
- colorsMaintained fork: @colors/colors · unmaintained since January 2022
- eslint-plugin-nodeMaintained fork: eslint-plugin-n · unmaintained since March 2020
- fakerMaintained fork: @faker-js/faker · unmaintained since January 2022
- parcel-bundlerRenamed package: parcel · unmaintained since March 2021
- snowpackSuccessor named by the maintainers: vite · unmaintained since April 2022
See the full index of covered packages, or read the methodology for how a verdict is reached and why a quiet package is not a dead one.