gruntjs Getting started with gruntjs

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Run grunt -h to see the following:

• Command line parameters
• All available standalone tasks in the Gruntfile of the current directory
• All subtasks of each suite of tasks in the Gruntfile of the current directory

Installing Grunt

Prerequesites

Grunt requires Node.js and npm to be installed. If you don’t have Node.js and/or npm installed on your machine, go to https://nodejs.org and download the installer or package for your operating system.

First-time install

If you're installing Grunt for the first time, you'll first have to install the Grunt command-line interface package grunt-cli globally.

npm install -g grunt-cli

This installs the command-line interface for Grunt globally so you can run the local version of Grunt in your project.

You can verify that you have grunt-cli package installed by running the following command:

grunt --version
 

This should print at least the current version of your grunt-cli package.

Installing Grunt in your project

After you have grunt-cli up and running, you can install the actual grunt task runner and your first Grunt package grunt-contrib-jshint :

npm install grunt --save-dev
npm install grunt-contrib-jshint --save-dev

This downloads the packages from NPM package manager and saves them as devDependencies to your package.json file.

Gruntfile

Next you need a Gruntfile.js in your project root that acts as a config file for Grunt tasks:

module.exports = function(grunt) {

    grunt.initConfig({
        jshint: {
            files: ['Gruntfile.js'],
        }
    });

    grunt.loadNpmTasks('grunt-contrib-jshint');


    grunt.registerTask('default', ['jshint']);
};

This file does three things:

1. It tells Grunt to load the grunt-contrib-jshint task from NPM package
2. It advices the jshint task to run against the file Gruntfile.js
3. It creates a Grunt task named default that runs the jshint task

Running Grunt

After you have set up your project you can run the default task of Grunt by calling:

grunt

This fires up grunt-cli that runs the local grunt which looks for a Grunt task named default which is configured to run the task called jshint .

Running tasks

Tasks in configuration

All attributes of grunt.initConfig are valid tasks, so if your Gruntfile looks like this:

module.exports = function(grunt) {

    grunt.initConfig({
        jshint: {
            files: ['Gruntfile.js'],
        }
    });

    grunt.loadNpmTasks('grunt-contrib-jshint');


    grunt.registerTask('default', ['jshint']);
};
 

The shell command $ grunt jshint will run the jshint task.

Tasks with targets

Tasks can have different targets. Take this snippet of code for example:

    grunt.initConfig({
        jshint: {
            gruntfile: {
                files: ['Gruntfile.js']
            },
            project: {
                files: 'src/**/*.js'
            }
        }
    });
 

Here, jshint can target the gruntfile or all JavaScript files of your project. If we run $ grunt jshint both targets will be used, but if we run $ grunt jshint:gruntfile the linter will only be applied to the gruntfile.

Registered tasks

The default tasks registered like this grunt.registerTask('default', ['jshint']); will run with the shell command $ grunt .

New registered tasks will run passing its name as a command line argument to grunt. For example:

grunt.registerTask('gruntfile', ['jshint:gruntfile']);
 

Will runt with $ grunt gruntfile .