The compression of files is quite a common practice within our local system, and across the World Wide Web. The most prominent use for file compression is to reduce the size of data that will be transferred across a network.
For our own purposes, we may at some point want to automate the compression of a file or folder that we'd like to make available for download or prepare for a transfer. The contrib-compress (0.10.0) plugin provides us with this functionality, along with options to specify the archive type and algorithms used in the process.
In this example, we'll work with the basic project structure we created in the Installing Grunt on a project recipe in Chapter 1, Getting Started with Grunt. Be sure to refer to it if you are not yet familiar with its contents.