Nodemon-like task in Grunt : execute node process and watch

Question

I feel like I\'m missing something.

Here is what I want to achieve :

Having a grunt task that executes my server.js and runs watch task

Answer 1

Hi I also came across this problem and here is my solution (based on nackjicholson's answer). This uses grunt-nodemon in a spawned process. so I can:

• Reload nodejs
• Watch for changes to e.g. .less files

• Get output of both tasks

  grunt.loadNpmTasks('grunt-nodemon');
  grunt.initConfig({
      nodemon: {
          dev: {
              options: {
                  file: 'server.js',
                  nodeArgs: ['--debug'],
                  env: {
                      PORT: '8282'
                  }
              }
          }
      },
  });
  
  grunt.registerTask('server', function (target) {
      // Running nodejs in a different process and displaying output on the main console
      var nodemon = grunt.util.spawn({
           cmd: 'grunt',
           grunt: true,
           args: 'nodemon'
      });
      nodemon.stdout.pipe(process.stdout);
      nodemon.stderr.pipe(process.stderr);
  
      // here you can run other tasks e.g. 
      // grunt.task.run([ 'watch' ]);
  
  });