Question

I am trying to minify an external css script using gruntjs and grunt-css plugin through the terminal.

The code I am running:

grunt --cssmin ../style.css > ../style1.css

Am I doing it right? Am I misunderstanding what Grunt is used for?

Thanks!

Here is what my generated style1.css looks like… It’s not minified.. I’m not sure what it is but it is doing something.

[31m<[39m[33mWARN[39m[31m>[39m [33mTask "cssmin" not found. Use --force to continue.[39m [31m</[39m[33mWARN[39m[31m>[39m

[31mAborted due to warnings.[39m

Answer 1

That is not exactly how Grunt works. Grunt uses a grunt file (grunt.js in v0.3 and Gruntfile.js in v0.4) to configure build instructions. First create a grunt file, grunt init:gruntfile and specify your css min targets there. I recommend reading the getting started guide in the Grunt docs:
https://github.com/gruntjs/grunt/wiki/Getting-started

You can use Sqwish (what grunt-css uses) directly to do the above. Install sqwish globally with npm install -g sqwish then type: sqwish -o ../style1.css ../style.css. Read more about Sqwish here: https://github.com/ded/sqwish