My must have grunt plugins of 2014

Over the course of the year, I’ve been tracking what Grunt plugins that I have enjoyed the most.

Time-Grunt

Time adds really helpful charts to the grunt process to allow for a visual inspection of where things are being slowed down. The graphs keep a very clear indicator of what is taking up time in the grunt processes. When caching layers are involved, is tends to show off the difference as well.

Grunt-Newer
Grunt Newer wraps any grunt task with a caching layer. It intelligently watches the incoming and outgoing files and validates if they have changed or not. If they have not changed, it simply returns the output of the previous run. It’s a real timesaver and extremely easy to use.

JIT-Grunt
JIT Grunt is magic. Instead of manually loading every grunt task any time you need to run grunt, JIT Grunt loads only the tasks needed. This does save time when the Grunt process is large and does many different things.

Grunt-Tracuer
Want modules in JS? How about block scope or classes or anything else the 6th version will bring? Why not write that code today and then compile it to ES5 compatible code! This plugin will get you partially there. You can compile from ES6 to AMD or CommonJS code. If you then need it in the browser, you can use something like Browserify (hint, that’s my next pick!)

Grunt-Browserify
Browserify is the next level of magic in a great toolchain. You can write CommonJS style code and then compile it into browser style code. Essentially it will package up your modules and create bundles for you while implementing the sugar needed to load them across the files.