For quite some time, I’ve been hearing a lot of great things about Grunt.js: What it does for automating tasks in the development process; how it is so configurable; the fact that it is open source and driven by such a great community of developers; and how much easier it is to configure compared to other build scripts, such as Ant. I even sat through a great session by Ben Alman (the creator) at the 2012 jQuery Conference in San Francisco.

When I initially took a look at the project and what it would take to get up and running, I was a little intimidated and did not really know where to begin. So, as I usually do in those situations, I put it off. Finally, after about a year of hearing so many positive opinions about Grunt, I decided to just sit down for an afternoon and dig into it. I am so glad I did because I absolutely LOVE it!

The setup process really isn’t as complicated as I made it out to be in my mind – it’s really just a JSON file, a JavaScript setup file and whatever packages you wish to install. Here is a link to my notes from that afternoon.