Grunt

A Javascript Task Runner

Grunt is a task runner for the JavaScript computer programming language. Through Grunt’s sophisticated automation system, all the grunt work of extra coding responsibilities becomes effortless.

Grunt: Performing Repetitive Tasks For You

Built on the Node.js platform, Grunt is a task-based command line build tool for JavaScript projects. With the scripting power of Grunt, you can automate repetitive tasks like minification, compilation, unit testing, linting, and more. From running tests to concatenating files and minifying scripts, Grunt aims to give developers a single unified set of commands for a variety of tasks that work for every single JavaScript project. Grunt has many built-in tasks to streamline and automate most mundane processes required to build a quality product in JavaScript, but its basic functionality can also be extended through third party plugins and scripts.

Grunt Makes You More Efficient

The less time and effort you have to spend performing routine scripting processes, the faster, easier, and more cost-effective your project becomes. Historically speaking, you would have had to run and configure almost all tools and procedures yourself, but with Grunt you can now abstract behind a conventional command line interface with a consistent means of configuration, only having to write your most complicated tasks once and leveraging them in all of your projects using project specific configuration.

Once you have configured your project through a Gruntfile, a task runner can do the vast majority of all the mundane work for you and your team with next to no effort. The Grunt community with its assortment of plugins is already strong and growing rapidly every day. While the plugin listing is more complete, here are just a few you may have heard of: CoffeeScript, handlebars, jade, JS Hint, {less}, RequireJS, Sass, and stylus.

With thousands of plugins to choose from, you can use Grunt to automate just about any grunt work you need done with a minimum of effort. If someone hasn't already built what you need, authoring and publishing your own Grunt plugin to npm is simple.

Grunt Makes These Companies Happy, and Can Do the Same for You!

Many different companies have used Grunt to simplify and expedite their project tasking; it is especially popular with prominent tech companies that develop apps for the web. You can check out Grunt’s official site for a more complete listing of who has used Grunt, but here are just a few of their noteworthy users: Adobe, Bitovi, Bootstrap, Bufferapp, Filament Group, Ghost, jQuery, Modernizr, Mozilla, Phaser, Sauce Labs, SitePen, Sourcey, Twitter, Walmart, and WordPress.