Brian Holt

Some Background

• College Dropout
• PHP Intern @ Nu Skin Enterprises
• Junior PHP Developer @ KSL
• Senior Front-End Developer @ Needle
• Taught Null to Node
• Director of redditgifts Front-End Development @ reddit

What is Grunt.JS?

Grunt.js is a taskrunner.

• Accomplish similar tasks to make, rake, jake, or other build tools.
• Grunt tasks are accomplished via plugins. There exist plugins for Sass complilation, JSHint, running shell tasks, AWS deployment, etc.
• Put simply, Grunt.js is supposed to make often-run tasks easy and painless to run.

Why? Why Grunt.js?

• It's easy to configure. You write Grunt in JavaScript.
• Great ecosystem. Lots of plugins already exist.
• Plugin doesn't exist for what you want to do? grunt-shell lets you run arbitrary commands from the shell. Or it's easy to make new ones!
• Features like LiveReload and watch are trivial to set up.

The Biggest Wins

• The worst kind of unit tests are the ones written but never run. You waste time writing them and over time your confidence in them degrades.
• It makes linting and style testing easy.
• It makes tools like {less} and Sass easy to introduce and use.
• Make your style and testing a Git pre-hook.

Let's make our own Grunt project.

Basics

• Grunt is based on node.js. Use npm to install Grunt and its plugins as dev dependencies.
• Grunt consumes a Gruntfile.js. There is where all your tasks and configuration.
• In addition, Grunt can consume your package.json if you want to keep your configurations in there (JSHint, for example.)

Let's Make a ... Gruntfile!

github.com/btholt/grunt-pres-php

Recap

• Grunt.js is a taskrunner.
• It easily runs tasks like compilations, linting, unit tests, or any arbitrary commands from the command line.
• It even does watches and LiveReload.
• The worst unit tests are those never run. Grunt.js helps you do that.
• Easy to configure and easy to create new plugins.
• Enforce styles and test by making it a Git hook.

Questions?