Last month I discovered Grunt, which is described as a “JavaScript task runner” by its creators. What’s that mean? Well, it allows you to automate mundane tasks like JS-linting, JavaScript/CSS minifying, compiling LESS into CSS, watching files for updates, and other development tasks. I had personally been using makefiles for these types of tasks, but after coming across a Grunt plugin for inlining AngularJS templates, I ended up going down the Grunt rabbit hole and converting over my makefiles to gruntfiles.

Once I had everything working with Grunt, I thought it might be fun to try and write my own plugin. Since Grunt is node.js based, I decided it might be neat to use the figlet.js library I wrote a while back to auto-generate ASCII banners for source code files. figlet.js was originally written to be browser-side only, so I had to do a little reworking to get it to work with node. However, after I had created an npm package for it, I wrote a simple grunt plugin around it called grunt-figlet. You can the result of a test run of the plugin below.

/**
 * _________            .___      
 * \_   ___ \  ____   __| _/____  
 * /    \  \/ /  _ \ / __ |/ __ \ 
 * \     \___(  <_> ) /_/ \  ___/ 
 *  \______  /\____/\____ |\___  >
 *         \/            \/    \/ 
 * This is a message for the comment body.
 * More random text...
 */
function abc(a,b,c){console.log(a+b+c);}var a=1,b=2,c=3;abc(a,b,c);

My office mate pointed out that it sort of defeats the purpose of minifying, but I still think its cool. The Text to ASCII Art Geneartor has a similar code comment feature, though it supports more languages. I’ll probably add support for other commenting styles into the grunt plugin later on, though right now I’m not sure if Grunt is used for any non-web development type projects.

After posting the project up someone submitted a change to allow the figlet library to work at the command line. However, I decided to break it out into its own package, so someone could use the library without it interfering with an existing installation of figlet. Ultimately I think it would be cool if this command line app mirrored the behavior of the c-based app. I mentioned the idea on the figlet mailing list, and Ian (the I in FIGlet) seemed to like idea. However, unless there’s suddenly a bunch of interest, right now that’s low on my list of things to do (though if you’re up for the task, feel free to submit changes to it).