Grunt

Once your local dev environment is set-up, it's a good idea to get started with Grunt. This is an extremely powerful JavaScript task runner, a build tool and and automation tool.

Some typical Grunt taks:

• Concatenation.

• Minification.

• Pre-processing Sass and Coffeescript.

• Image Optimization.

• Running tests.

• Starting a development Server.

Installation:

Global: npm -g install grunt-cli

Dev: npm install grunt --save-dev

Create a package.json file in your root directory with npm init

//package.json
{
  "name": "my-project",
  "version": "0.0.1",
  "devDependencies": {
    "grunt": "~0.4.4"
  }
}

Create a Gruntfile.js

module.exports = function(grunt) {

  // Project configuration.
  grunt.initConfig({
    simplemocha: {
      options: {
        timeout: 3000,
        ignoreLeaks: false,
        reporter: 'tap'
      },

      all: { src: ['test/**/*.js'] }
    },
    jshint: {
      all: ['Gruntfile.js','test/**/*.js']
    }
  });

  // Simplemocha test
  grunt.loadNpmTasks('grunt-simple-mocha');

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

  // Default task.
  grunt.registerTask('default', 'simplemocha');

};

npm install to install dependencies.

Here is an example of Grunt compiling SASS.

grunt-sass-boilerplate