I’ve recently become a fan of Grunt. It’s a JavaScript task runner that get installed within a project to handle jobs for the project. For me it’s extremely useful for a whole range of things – even in just a short 2 weeks I’ve got so much more value from using it than I ever expected.
If you’re a developer of any kind then Grunt is something that you could probably benefit from using. The reason? This is the reason they give on their homepage:
In one word: automation.
On it’s own Grunt doesn’t do a lot – it runs tasks but you need to define those tasks for it to be useful.
Tasks are defined by plugins installed alongside Grunt. There’s already thousands of plugins created that do many of the things that you might need (4,403 of them at time of writing). Many of them are officially maintained by the team at Grunt, so you can guarantee a decent level of support or documentation will be available.
Grunt for WordPress Development
I mostly work on WordPress projects. PHP, JavaScript, HTML and CSS is what I deal with daily. Grunt has MANY tasks available for working with those. There’s 2 specific things that are extremely useful.
Linting
Linting is the process of parsing your code and making sure it complies with a set of predefined rules. It can parse for errors as well as coding standards and all of the major code types used in WordPress can be linted with readily available tools.
Being notified of errors in code as they are introduced can save many hours of debugging.
Combine + Minify
Making sure you have comments in your files so you know what’s happening at a given point is good practice. It’s also good practice to serve optimized files to users – in as few requests and bytes as possible.
Combining your styles and scripts reduces the amount of requests needed and eliminates any overheads associated with additional requests. Minfying them as well will make sure you’re sending only the data that you need.
Making sure your images are optimized or compressed as well can save a lot of unnecessary transfer. You can have Grunt handle that for you too.
Watching for Changes
Since automation is the name of the game you can make use of the Watch task. It watches for changes to your files and when it detects them goes ahead and runs certain tasks. As a starting point watching your styles and scripts for changes then recompiling them could save you hours of time to spend on doing more useful things in your project.