You don't need global grunt

Grunt is an excellent build tool for JavaScript projects. It is simple to get started, has tonnes of plugins, but requires a global installation.

npm install -g grunt-cli

I hate requiring a global tool just to build something. Each of my Travis projects has to install grunt-cli before running unit tests

before_script:
  - npm install -g grunt-cli

It is hard to enforce a specific global grunt version too. Can I avoid having to install Grunt globally? There are several ways one can get around having to install grunt-cli

grunt-cli as devDependency

Instead of relying on the global grunt-cli, we can install it as a project's dev dependency.

npm install --save-dev grunt-cli

then we can connect NPM scripts to run the grunt commands

package.json

{
    "scripts": {
        "build": "grunt",
        "test": "grunt test"
    }
}

$ npm run build
> [email protected] build /git/ng-describe
> grunt
>> Local Npm module "grunt-cli" not found. Is it installed?
Running "nice-package" task
package.json fixed!
...

grunt-cli gives a warning (above), but runs just fine. If we use Node version > 0.10 we can even pass arguments to the grunt executable

$ npm run build -- --verbose
> [email protected] build /git/ng-describe
> grunt --verbose
Initializing
Command-line options: --verbose
...

Skip grunt completely

I also hate writing Gruntfile.js - too much boilerplate, and I never remember which plugins I need to load, etc. Here is a way around it.

For some projects, you might not need many plugins, and instead connect the individual grunt plugins (like the very good grunt-contrib-concat) to NPM scripts via grunty. Grunty fakes grunt file to run a plugin directly.

npm install --save-dev grunty grunt-contrib-concat

To concatenate a couple of files into a desired file, instead of writing a Gruntfile.js, just specify input and output options in the package's script command

package.json

"scripts": {
  "concat": "grunty grunt-contrib-concat concat --src=a.js,b.js --dest=dist/out.js"
}

You can even place the plugin's configuration into a JSON or JavaScript file for simplicity

concat.json

{
  "concat": {
    "default": {
      "src": ["test/a.js", "test/b.js"],
      "dest": "test/out-json-config.js"
    }
  }
}

and use the configuration filename instead of the separate arguments

package.json

"scripts": {
  "concat": "grunty grunt-contrib-concat concat concat.json"
}