Introducing the Grunt task runner

MEAN application development, and any other software development in general, often involves redundant repetition. Daily operations such as running, testing, debugging, and preparing your application for the production environment becomes monotonous and should be abstracted by some sort of an automation layer. You may be familiar with Ant or Rake, but in JavaScript projects, the automation of repetitive tasks can be easily done using the Grunt task runner. Grunt is a Node.js command-line tool that uses custom and third-party tasks to automate a project's build process. This means you can either write your own automated tasks, or better yet, take advantage of the growing Grunt eco-system and automate common operations using third-party Grunt tasks. In this section, you'll learn how to install, configure, and use Grunt. The examples in this chapter will continue directly from those in previous chapters, so copy the final example from Chapter 10...