Most of my projects are fairly similar: I need to concatinate and compress a bunch of js files together; compile sass and fire-up a local server to test and preview.. Grunt.js is brilliant for this and I cannot tell you how much it has improved my workflow since I started using it this year. Along the way I have found a few time-savers that have greatly improved how I use Grunt so I thought I'd share them here with you.
Dynamically load all Grunt tasks
If you use a bunch of Grunt tasks for your project you'll know that it is a pain, albeit slight, to individually register each task, especially when adding new packages. Why not register them all at once so that every time you add a new package you do not have to do anything except install it? Well load-grunt-tasks by Sindre Sorhus does just that.
// Use this:require('load-grunt-tasks')(grunt)// Instead of this:grunt.loadNpmTasks('grunt-shell')grunt.loadNpmTasks('grunt-sass')grunt.loadNpmTasks('grunt-recess')grunt.loadNpmTasks('grunt-sizediff')grunt.loadNpmTasks('grunt-svgmin')grunt.loadNpmTasks('grunt-styl')grunt.loadNpmTasks('grunt-php')grunt.loadNpmTasks('grunt-eslint')grunt.loadNpmTasks('grunt-concurrent')grunt.loadNpmTasks('grunt-bower-requirejs')
See how it's done in Kickoff's Gruntfile
Check and find updates for your NPM dependencies
Have you ever found it hard to know if grunt-contrib-watch has been updated recently? What would happen if you wanted to check all your project's dependencies and then install them? It would take ages. npm-check-updates takes care of this for you; it actually does the check and can even update your package.json with any changes so you all you now need to do is run npm-check-updates -u && npm install
. I suggest installing the package globally (sudo npm install npm-check-updates -g
) so that you can always use it from any directory.
To make this even easier to use I created a bash alias:
alias npmui="npm-check-updates -u && npm install"
Add this to your ~/.bash-profile
and you're good to go.
Use variables to avoid repetition
Typically there will be about two or three places within my Gruntfile.js
that I declare the same group of files that will be used by certain tasks so to avoid repetition I create an array that lists each file which I use throughout my Gruntfile (I also use simple variables to specify file or directory names).
A good example of this might be javascripts used by jshint, uglifyjs and my watch task. Where each of these tasks specify a src
key, I provide a variable as their value. See below for a simplified example of this or have another look at Kickoff's Gruntfile for a more extensive example.
/*** Specify which js files you want to include*/var jsFileList = ['js/helpers/helpers.js','js/helpers/console.js','js/script.js',]/*** Specify your output directory*/var distDir = 'js/dist/'/*** Specify the name of your compiled JS file* which will be placed in the directory you define above*/var jsFile = 'app.min.js'/*** Project configuration*/grunt.initConfig({pkg: require('./package'),/*** JSHint* https://github.com/gruntjs/grunt-contrib-jshint* Manage the options inside .jshintrc file*/jshint: {all: jsFileList,options: {jshintrc: '.jshintrc',},},/*** Uglify* https://github.com/gruntjs/grunt-contrib-uglify* Minifies and concatinates your JS* Also creates source maps*/uglify: {options: {sourceMap: distDir + jsFile + '.map',sourceMappingURL: jsFile + '.map',},/*** Use the array at the top of this file to specify which js files you include*/js: {src: jsFileList,dest: distDir + jsFile,},},})
Create local server and watch for changes
Grunt connect is extremely useful for creating a local server, but having it running means that you can't run grunt watch
at the same time. To overcome this problem, register a new Grunt task called serve
that runs grunt watch and grunt connect. See below:
grunt.registerTask('serve', ['connect', 'watch'])
Use grunt serve
to run the task; see how this was used in Kickoff's Gruntfile and in particular lines 171-184.
Conclusion
These are just a few that I use regularly but I'm sure there are more. Please leave a comment with any suggestions or other useful tips you may have.
If you haven't used Grunt before and are looking to improve your workflow I highly recommend checking it out, see gruntjs.com for more info.