Grunt Skeleton

A personal starting point for web prototypes. To take any credit for this would be ridiculous, as it's really just a collection of great grunt plugins and a simple, opinionated directory structure.

What does it come with?

It currently supports CoffeeScript, Stylus (with Nib), and automatic CommonJS-style wrapping, so JS classes can be written like they would be in Node. Also, I really just dislike the AMD syntax.

Lib-wise, it comes with jQuery, Modernizr, and Normalize.

Some other clever defaults:

• scripts/vendor and style/vendor are automatically combined with your CSS/JS
• Stylus files that start with an underscore are not compiled to files

Requirements

You'll need Node.js & NPM. I'll let you figure that out, since people like all sorts of wacky package managers.

This project uses the upcoming Grunt .4. Install this by running:

npm install -g grunt-cli

Now just enter the directory and install the local dependencies:

npm install

Available Commands

• grunt (default) — Build and concatenate files, but don't minify anything.
• grunt minify — Build and concatenate files, minified. Also strips all console.* messages from JavaScript.
• grunt server — Run default grunt command, start a server at localhost:8000, then watch for any changes and call LiveReload if there's an update. You'll need a LiveReload browser extension installed and turned on. I might remove this extension dependency in the future by injecting it automatically with Connect.

Of course, you can view all the available commands by running:

grunt -h

Next Steps

This is just a boilerplate for myself, so I won't be making any grand feature promises. I will likely add Handlebars support soon, just haven't needed it yet. I would consider making the Gruntfile more extensible (using more config variables, etc.) if there's enough interest.