Updating file references in a json file via a grunt task

Question

I\'m a JavaScript developer and fairly new to creating a build process from scratch. I chose to use Grunt for my current project and have created a GruntFile that does about 90%

Answer 1

I disagree with the other answers here.

1) Why use grunt.file.write instead of fs? grunt.file.write is just a wrapper for fs.writeFilySync (see code here).

2) Why use fs.writeFileSync when grunt makes it really easy to do stuff asynchronously? There's no doubt that you don't need async in a build process, but if it's easy to do, why wouldn't you? (It is, in fact, only a couple characters longer than the writeFileSync implementation.)

I'd suggest the following:

var fs = require('fs');
grunt.registerTask('writeManifest', 'Updates the project manifest', function() {
    var manifest = require('./path/to/manifest'); // .json not necessary with require
    manifest.fileReference = '/new/file/location';
    // Calling this.async() returns an async callback and tells grunt that your
    // task is asynchronous, and that it should wait till the callback is called
    fs.writeFile('./path/to/manifest.json', JSON.stringify(manifest, null, 2), this.async());

    // Note that "require" loads files relative to __dirname, while fs
    // is relative to process.cwd(). It's easy to get burned by that.
});