Uptil now, we haven't discussed any details of the Grunt Application Programming Interface (API). If the appearance of grunt in or around all of the gruntfile code snippets that we have seen so far has caught your eye, then you are to be congratulated for noticing that grunt is providing some things that we need in order to set up and configure our automated tasks.

Grunt exposes all of its properties and methods via the grunt object. Returning to the wrapper function that was provided as an example in the beginning of the gruntfile.js section, we can see that its anonymous function takes the grunt object as its only argument:

module.exports = function(grunt) {
  // grunt related code
};

It is through the grunt object that we can access all of its properties and methods and this is why this wrapper method is required.

A discussion of modules will be useful in order to get a better understanding of how node.js can share items, such as objects, properties, and methods...