A brief talk introducing Grunt as a task management option for the development team.

2. Introduction
➔
➔
➔
➔
Grunt is a workflow / task automation tool.
Built on top of Node.js.
Primary focus is web development.
Awesome range of plugins.

3. A workflow / task automation tool
Build automation is the act of scripting or automating a wide variety of tasks
that software developers do in their day-to-day activities including things like:
●
compiling computer source code into binary code
●
packaging binary code
●
running tests
●
deployment to production systems
●
creating documentation and/or release notes

4. Built on top of
It’s better than…
● Shell scripts / Batch files
● ANT
● Rake
➔ It’s written in JavaScript, and we all know that.
➔ It’s modular, and manages its own dependencies in a
clean, source-control friendly way.

5. Focus is on web development

6. Enough talk.
Show me some magic.

7. Let’s see what we can do with Grunt: http://bit.ly/19A7Vq7

8. This is cool, and it’s flexible. We can make it work with PHP/.NET

9. How did we achieve that?
Plugins.

11. Plugins
grunt-contrib-watch
Watch filesystem for changes
grunt-file-creator
Create arbitrary files
grunt-contrib-connect
Start a simple web server
grunt-text-replace
Replace text in files
grunt-open
Launch a browser
grunt-git-describe
Get tags from Git
grunt-contrib-concat
Concatenate files
grunt-contrib-copy
Copy files
grunt-contrib-sass
Compile SASS files
grunt-contrib-compress
Create Zip/Tar/Gz files
grunt-contrib-clean
Empty a directory
grunt-connect-rewrite
Symlinks for web server
assemble
Generate a static website from templates
grunt-karma
Karma testing
grunt-imageoptim
Optimize images
grunt-plato
JS Static code analysis
grunt-aws-s3
Upload/Download from AWS S3

12. Grunt does two really useful things.
➔ It ties your plugins together
and runs them in a specific order.
➔ It normalises (to a certain extent) the format in which
you supply options to the plugins.
As an added bonus…
➔ Grunt + NPM helps manage build dependencies.

13. Time for another trick.
...installing a project from scratch.

14. Starting from scratch*
➔ Fresh directory / machine
➔ Node.js & Grunt Cli installed (but nothing more)
➔
➔
➔
➔
git clone https://github.com/psyked/grunt-example-project
cd grunt-example-project
npm install
grunt

15. What is this magic?
It’s package.json

16. Introducing package.json
➔ It’s a standard part of Node.js
➔ It describes your project, including its dependencies.
➔ It gets auto-updated as you ‘install’ additional plugins for
your project.
➔ Create one using npm init
➔ Auto-add dependencies by installing them with the -save-dev flag

17. Enough talk.
Show me how.

18. First up, let’s get started with Grunt
1. Install Node.js
2. From the command line, run:
npm install grunt-cli -g

19. Running Grunt tasks
➔ Run a default task:
grunt
➔ Run a specific task:
grunt taskname
➔ Run a task config:
grunt taskname:config