Grunt is a task automation tool that provides the platform for an ever-growing ecosystem of plugins. These plugins provide the actual implementation for the tasks that can be automated. File management, testing, deployment, template rendering, code generation, and much more can be automated using easily configurable tasks.
The Grunt platform's key strength lies in the simple methodology it has defined for task configuration, and the fact that all the plugins it supports tend to adhere to this methodology. This provides developers with a faster way to start using tools that would previously have taken more time to learn, while also presenting the configuration in a standard format that can be easily understood, manipulated, and shared.
The Grunt Cookbook aims to provide easy-to-follow instructions to automate all kinds of tasks that your projects need to perform on a regular basis. We'll start with the most basic and common tasks, work our way up to creating our own tasks, and eventually generate entire sites using only Grunt.
The chapters of this book will each focus on a specific topic for which a collection of recipes will be provided. Many of the recipes will explore the automation of similar tasks, using different tools or libraries. Each recipe also explores popular variations on its theme, just in case you have more specific needs.
Chapter 1, Getting Started with Grunt, starts with working though setting up Grunt to be used within a Node.js-based project, and covers some of the more common automations.
Chapter 2, File Management, covers the copying, compressing, linking, concatenation, and download of files. Working with file is probably the most common task that we'll encounter in any software project.
Chapter 3, Templating Engines, covers the rendering, compilation, and packaging of templates using some of the more popular engines. The practice of rendering content from templates is essential in the development of web-based projects.
Chapter 4, Generating CSS and JavaScript, covers the generation of CSS and JavaScript code. Using new languages that compile to JavaScript and CSS preprocessors that generate CSS can save time and improve the flexibility of a project.
Chapter 5, Running Automated Tests, covers the running of test suites and generating code coverage reports. Automated testing has become an essential part of all larger software projects and is an invaluable tool to ensure the stability and quality of code.
Chapter 6, Deployment Preparations, covers the optimization of images, minifying of CSS, ensuring the quality of our JavaScript code, compressing it, and packaging it all together into one source file.
Chapter 7, Deploying to the End User, covers the transfer of files to a network location, refreshing caching services and running commands on remote servers. Once we've got a functioning and optimized web application, it's time to make it accessible to its intended users.
Chapter 8, Creating Custom Tasks, covers all the aspects involved in creating our own custom tasks. At some point, you may encounter something that you'd like to automate but can't find a Grunt task that works exactly the way you need it to. This is when building a custom task can become invaluable to your operations and potentially make a hero out of you.
Chapter 9, Authoring Plugins, covers the process of discovering plugins, contributing to the existing plugin projects, and creating plugin projects of our own. The Grunt project would be nothing without its ecosystem of plugins, and we as developers, can partake in their creation and evolution.
Chapter 10, Static Sites, generates an entire static website using the Assemble plugin. Simpler websites that host content that doesn't change very often can mostly be generated once and uploaded to a hosting service.
The only requirement for using the recipes in this book is a Node.js installation. This can be done either through downloading and running the installer, compiling from the source code, using a tool such as Node Version Manager (https://github.com/creationix/nvm), or using the package manager supported by your operating system.
If you have never worked with Grunt before, it's highly recommended that you start with Chapter 1, Getting Started with Grunt, as all the later chapters will reference it.
This book will be useful to anyone who wishes to build anything from a static website to a more modern web application. Some basic JavaScript experience is preferable and some rudimentary knowledge of the Node.js platform could also come in handy.
In this book, you will find several headings that appear frequently (Getting ready, How to do it..., How it works..., There's more..., and See also).
To give clear instructions on how to complete a recipe, we use these sections as follows:
This section tells you what to expect in the recipe, and describes how to set up any software or any preliminary settings required for the recipe.
This section usually consists of a detailed explanation of what happened in the previous section.
This section consists of additional information about the recipe in order to make the reader more knowledgeable about the recipe.
In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "The simplest way to create a package.json file is to use the npm init command."
A block of code is set as follows:
{
"name": "myproject",
"version": "0.0.0",
"description": "My first Grunt project.",
"main": "index.js",
"scripts": {
"test": "echo \"Error: no test specified\" && exit 1"
},
"author": "",
"license": "ISC"
}When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:
'curl-dir': {
weather: {
router: function (url) {
var city = url.slice(url.indexOf('=') + 1, url.length);
return city + '.json';
},
src: 'http://api.openweathermap.org/'
+ 'data/2.5/weather?q={London,Paris,Tokyo}',
dest: 'weather'
}
}Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
Running "newer:jshint" (newer) task Running "newer:jshint:sample" (newer) task No newer files to process.
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "Clicking the Next button moves you to the next screen."
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