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
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:
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' ]);
});
since writing this, a nice person developed that.
I was having a lot of trouble using grunt.util.spawn to fire off new processes. They would run, but they wouldn't give me any output back. Perhaps you can figure out what I could not in these docs. http://gruntjs.com/api/grunt.util#grunt.util.spawn
node server.js
over and over again everytime a file changes. It will work on the first time, for it to really work you'd have to manage the server as a child process, killing and restarting it on subsequent file changes.For the registerTask arguments try this, just to see if you can get something to work in your current implementation.
http://gruntjs.com/api/grunt.task#grunt.task.registertask
It takes (taskName, description, taskFunction)
like so:
grunt.registerTask('start', 'My start task description', function() {
grunt.util.spawn({
cmd: 'node',
args: ['server.js']
});
grunt.task.run('watch');
});
That might at least get your watch
to run node server.js
the first time a file changes.
Here's what I would do instead.
Either just use nodemon $ nodemon server.js
as is
or...
He is managing the server as a child process, might be what you're looking for.
or...
Get grunt-shell
npm install grunt-shell --save-dev
And use it to run nodemon for you:
module.exports = function(grunt) {
// Project configuration.
grunt.initConfig({
serverFile: 'server.js',
shell: {
nodemon: {
command: 'nodemon <%= serverFile %>',
options: {
stdout: true,
stderr: true
}
}
},
watch: { /* nothing to do in watch anymore */ }
});
grunt.loadNpmTasks('grunt-contrib-watch');
grunt.loadNpmTasks('grunt-shell');
grunt.registerTask('default', 'shell:nodemon');
};
$ grunt shell:nodemon
I sincerely hope that helps. Good luck!
The issue is that tasks like watch and nodemon will never terminate, so grunt will never reach them. You need to spawn a new process.
You can do this easily using grunt-concurrent:
https://github.com/sindresorhus/grunt-concurrent
For example:
module.exports = function(grunt) {
grunt.initConfig({
...
concurrent: {
dev: {
tasks: ['nodemon', 'watch'],
options: {
logConcurrentOutput: true
}
}
}
});
};
The two will now run happily side by side.