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It takes a combination of factors to keep things lean and mean so that our websites can load as fast as possible. There are many things we can do to help page performance including, but not limited to:

Using a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
Optimizing our images to the smallest possible file size
Loading JavaScripts at the end, just inside of the closing body tag
Combining multiple JavaScript and CSS files down into fewer files where possible
Shortening the text and removing extraneous linefeeds in our JavaScript files

Cumulatively, these can shave a few seconds off the page load time of large pages, and even smaller pages can become a bit snappier. Let’s examine that last item in the list which concerns optimizing our JavaScript files.

We can run our files through an optimizer that shrinks them down for us – but this is a time consuming process if we need to do it manually every time we make an adjustment. And then what? They are all shrunk down, and not very “human readable.” So we need to maintain an uncompressed copy somewhere, and then maybe work on that when we need to make changes – and then compress that original version down each time.

Computers have the power to automate the mundane, and to create processes that are streamlined for us. Grunt helps us to automate common tasks which we encounter during our JavaScript development.

I’ve just mentioned shrinking down the files into a more efficient form, but Grunt also handles automated testing, linting, and more. Grunt has a huge (and growing) collection of plugins which extend its power to ever more uses.

How to install Grunt?

1. Install npm (Node Package Manager)
2. Use npm to install Grunt


echo "testing 1 2 3";

//comments are here

$e = "that";

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I’m happy to work on almost any Linux, on any server, hosted anywhere, but this page has a recurring theme of AWS Linux on an Amazon Linux AMI. In light of that I will make a special note that as of this writing, the default package manager for CentOS/RHEL (yum) does not contain a package for node. So we can use the instructions on this page to install Node, which Grunt requires:

https://github.com/joyent/node/wiki/installing-node.js-via-package-manager

First, we need EPEL:
EPEL 6: yum install \
http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/6/x86_64/epel-release-6-8.noarch.rpm

EPEL 7: yum install \
http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/beta/7/x86_64/epel-release-7-0.2.noarch.rpm

Then install the nodejs and npm packages:

$ sudo yum install nodejs npm --enablerepo=epel

Need Some Global Installs
npm install -g grunt-init

And then there is project scaffolding…

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I am Grunt!