If you’re not familiar with Grunt, you should know that you can get documentation at their website and you can get their code on github. There’s a great getting started tutorial at their website. This post will cover a lot of that, specially tuned for AWS EC2 instances with NodeJS, Neo4j, Angular, Stylus, Topcoat, and Express. This post assumes you’ve already got those packages and their dependencies installed on your AWS machine. Feel free to reachout if you’re in need of help.

Getting started with Grunt

From their site

Grunt 0.4.x requires stable Node.js versions >= 0.8.0. Odd version numbers of Node.js are considered unstable development versions.

First, we want the Grunt Command Line Interface utility that will be available all over our machine. npm install -g grunt-cli

npm install grunt --save

When you run grunt from ~/your/project/ directory, it will look for Gruntfile.js. So we’ll make that now. touch Gruntfile.js

open Gruntfile.js

In our grunt file, we’ll start simple:

module.exports = function(grunt){
  "use strict";

  grunt.initConfig({

  });
};

Grunt files are written in .js, and use the require() method. grunt methods typically take JSON blobs, but you can use fully formed JS in them as well.