How to use Grunt to automate repetitive tasks

Grunt is a task runner. What that means is that it will open a specified program, perform specified tasks on your files, close the program, move to the next task on the list, then repeat until the end of the list. For each project you might lint (proofread) your css and js files, concatenate all your js files so they’ll load once, minimize your css and js files to make them smaller and load faster, compress your image files so they’ll load faster, and create several sizes of a mobile icon. Grunt can automate this process — you no longer need to do each task manually one by one. In this article, we’ll completely set up grunt on our system and make it run one task for us. I’ll explain how I got each piece of the puzzle so we’ll know how to set up the other tasks.