Dan robberts in Coding 34 minutes

Supercharge Your Workflow With Grunt

The Grunt ecosystem is huge and it’s growing every day. With literally hundreds of plugins to choose from, you can use Grunt to automate just about anything with a minimum of effort. If someone hasn’t already built what you need, authoring and publishing your own Grunt plugin to npm is a breeze. See how to get started.

In one word: automation. The less work you have to do when performing repetitive tasks like minification, compilation, unit testing, linting, etc, the easier your job becomes. After you’ve configured it through a Gruntfile, a task runner can do most of that mundane work for you—and your team—with basically zero effort.

Jekyll also offers powerful support for code snippets:

{
  "name": "my-project-name",
  "version": "0.1.0",
  "devDependencies": {
    "grunt": "~0.4.5",
    "grunt-contrib-jshint": "~0.10.0",
    "grunt-contrib-nodeunit": "~0.4.1",
    "grunt-contrib-uglify": "~0.5.0"
  }
}

The easiest way to add Grunt and gruntplugins to an existing package.json is with the command npm install <module> --save-dev. Not only will this install <module> locally, but it will automatically be added to the devDependencies section, using a tilde version range.

For example, this will install the latest version of Grunt in your project folder, adding it to your devDependencies:

Grunt