We really accomplished quite a bit in this chapter. We were able to lay the groundwork to work with Grunt by creating a sample application. After all, we need a project to automate. At this time, it is not necessary for us to be spending time trying to figure out what application we want to build and how we are going to approach it. Rather, we can use an application like Angular Seed to generate our application skeleton for us. Now that you have been introduced to this scaffolding tool, you will be able to use it for any future Angular.JS applications you need to bootstrap.

We covered the installation of Git as it was used for the cloning of Angular Seed and also used in the setup and configuration of an Angular Seed sample application by installing its dependencies. As you learned, there can be some roadblocks that can prevent us from easily installing tools from the command line. We covered a few ways to get the command-line tools up and running, depending on different problems that you might have run into along the way.

Once we were able to get past any command-line tool issues, we were able to run the npm install command from within our project so that the Angular Seed dependencies would be resolved. Once this was done, we were able to launch a local HTTP server instance easily and then navigate to it to ensure that our application was running as we expected. Now, whenever we want to test our changes, we can navigate to our application's URL to check and make sure that our modifications are looking and behaving as we expect.

In the next chapter, we will take a look at Grunt plugins. Plugins, or tasks, are the work-horses of Grunt task automation. You will learn to identify tasks that will be of benefit to you in your projects. Through this identification, you will discern the information that you need in order to find plugins that will provide solutions to the problems that you want to solve. We will, by example, go through the process of installation and configuration of plugins and how they are implemented in your project.