Chapter 3
One Task, Many Outputs

So far we’ve looked at simple tasks, but sometimes it’s handy to be able to define a single task that does many things at once. For example, let’s say you were creating next week’s new JavaScript framework and you wanted to create a full version and a micro version that includes only the basics. Using Grunt’s multitasks, you can create a single task definition that iterates over a collection of targets and executes code against those targets with ease.

So what’s a target? You could think of a target as a configuration group for a task. You set up a configuration block that specifies the target and the associated data:

The task then executes its code against all the targets you specify, using the data to determine what the task should do. Many Grunt plug-ins are implemented as multitasks.

In this chapter, we’ll explore how multitasks work by working first with targets and data, and then with files.