Automate with Grunt

Wrangling the JavaScript

Our index.html file is looking for a file called assets/app.js, but all we have are several separate CoffeeScript files. Using Grunt, we’ll compile those CoffeeScript files into a single JavaScript file, then combine that file with the Angular and Markdown libraries, creating a single file we can bring into our document. And to ensure that the file downloads even faster, we’ll minify it, which will remove whitespace and rename variables and functions to reduce the overall file size considerably.

Compiling CoffeeScript

Let’s set up a basic package.json and Gruntfile for our app. First, create package.json with the following contents:

{
  "name": "MarkdownEditor",
  "version": "0.0.1",
  "description"