Chris Coyier wrote a great guide in which he explains how easily is to learn and use Grunt. For those that don’t, Grunt is a task manager that will help you with your daily tasks as a developer. Chris shows how to install and start using it. I must admit that it is one of the best Grunt tutorials out there and I really enjoyed reading it. Here is a small part of it:
Perhaps you’ve heard of Grunt, but haven’t done anything with it. I’m sure that applies to many of you. Maybe one of the following hang-ups applies to you.
I don’t need the things Grunt does
You probably do, actually. Check out that list up top. Those things aren’t nice-to-haves. They are pretty vital parts of website development these days. If you already do all of them, that’s awesome. Perhaps you use a variety of different tools to accomplish them. Grunt can help bring them under one roof, so to speak. If you don’t already do all of them, you probably should and Grunt can help. Then, once you are doing those, you can keep using Grunt to do more for you, which will basically make you better at doing your job.
Grunt runs on Node.js — I don’t know Node
You don’t have to know Node. Just like you don’t have to know Ruby to use Sass. Or PHP to use WordPress. Or C++ to use Microsoft Word.
I have other ways to do the things Grunt could do for me
Are they all organized in one place, configured to run automatically when needed, and shared among every single person working on that project? Unlikely, I’d venture.
Grunt is a command line tool — I’m just a designer
I’m a designer too. I prefer native apps with graphical interfaces when I can get them. But I don’t think that’s going to happen with Grunt1.
The extent to which you need to use the command line is:
- Navigate to your project’s directory.
- Type
gruntand press Return.After set-up, that is, which again isn’t particularly difficult.
Read the guide here: http://24ways.org/2013/grunt-is-not-weird-and-hard/