This directory contains build tools for Shiny.

Grunt is a build tool that runs on node.js. In Shiny, it is used for concatenating, minifying, and linting Javascript code.

Grunt requires Node.js and npm (the Node.js package manager). Installation of these programs differs across platforms and is generally pretty easy, so I won't include instructions here.

Once node and npm are installed, install grunt:

# Install grunt command line tool globally
sudo npm install -g grunt-cli

# Install grunt plus modules for this project
npm install

# To update modules in the future
npm update

To run all default grunt tasks (concatenation, minification, and jshint), simply go into the tools directory and run:

grunt

It's also useful to run grunt so that it monitors files for changes and run tasks as necessary. This is done with:

grunt watch

One of the tasks concatenates all the .js files in /srcjs together into /inst/www/shared/shiny.js. Another task minifies shiny.js to generate shiny.min.js. The minified file is supplied to the browser, along with a source map file, shiny.min.js.map, which allows a user to view the original Javascript source when using the debugging console in the browser.

During development of Shiny's Javascript code, it's best to use grunt watch so that the minified file will get updated whenever you make changes the Javascript sources.