Book Image

Node.js By Example

Book Image

Node.js By Example

Overview of this book

Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Node.js By Example
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

The task runner and building system


Along with the practice of running the Node.js server, there are other best practices pertaining to web development tasks that you can consider. We are building a web application. So, we have client-side JavaScript and CSS that has to be delivered in the best possible way. In other words, to increase the performance of our website, we need to merge all the JavaScript into a single file and compress it. The same is valid for the CSS style sheets. If you do this, the browser will make fewer requests to the server.

Node.js is a common tool for command-line utilities, except for when you want to run web servers. There are many modules available for the packaging and optimizing of assets. It is great that there are task runners and build systems that help you manage these processes.

Introducing Grunt

Grunt is one of the most popular task runners that are based on Node.js. It is available in the package manager registry and can be installed by using the following...