working Grunt into a primitive build workflow part 1

I'm sold on grunt, but I'm responsible for maintaining legacy JavaScript at work so now I'm trying to organize the code so I can use grunt as part of a build process.

The Old Way: download a fresh copy of our global.js script from production every time before commencing with a change. Make the modification by appending a new $(document).ready() block to the end of the file. Cross my fingers, and upload to production.

This is unsustainable. We are using JavaScript more and more every day, and depending on a household deity (me) to keep everything together by using hopes and prayers is going to fail dramatically one day.

Towards a permanent solution to this situation I looked into replacing our hand edits with a build process. I'm familiar with ant from a previous development position many years ago, but I wasn't satisfied with ant's support for web workflows. Enter grunt. Grunt is written in node, and is therefore installed through npm. There are dozens of plugins for grunt, but the ones I need are jshint, uglify, and concat. I'll want to add some more as I settle in with grunt (particularly qunit), but first things first.

I've been using jslint on my code, but apparently my settings have been fairly permissive. After getting my grunt configuration setup (Gruntfile.js), I setup a task list that contained jshint, concat, and uglify. Well, jshint just about had a heart attack. Part of this is because of our organization's extensive use of jQuery—most of our code just assumes it exists. You can tell jshint that you're making such an assumption, but it needs to be specifically stated in a comment block before the code that attempts to use jQuery.

I could force grunt to ignore the jshint errors, but what's the point of using a build tool if you're going to start developing bad habits? Now I have grunt installed, getting my code in better shape is my next step.

Once this is done we should have a nice, reliable, way of maintaining our global.js code. After that comes working in unit testing with qunit. It's all for a good cause. :)