Open Source JavaScript Task Runners

Why use a task runner? In one word, automation. The less work you have to do when performing repetitive tasks like minification, compilation, unit testing, linting, etc, the easier your job becomes. After you've configured it through a Gruntfile, a task runner can do most of that mundane work for you and your team with basically zero effort. The Grunt ecosystem is huge and it's growing every day. With literally hundreds of plugins to choose from, you can use Grunt to automate just about anything with a minimum of effort. If someone hasn't already built what you need, authoring and publishing your own Grunt plugin to npm is a breeze. Many of the tasks you need are already available as Grunt Plugins, and new plugins are published every day. While installing grunt is simple, it's slightly more involved to get it running on your project.