Running grunt task with api, without command line

Question

I want to create and run grunt task in node.js code for test use.

var foo = function() {
    var grunt = require(\"grunt\");

    var options = {\"blahblah\"         


        

Answer 1

You can. I don't know why anyone would need to do this as currently Grunt is a command line tool. WARNING: I don't recommend running Grunt in this way. But here it is:

var grunt = require('grunt');

// hack to avoid loading a Gruntfile
// You can skip this and just use a Gruntfile instead
grunt.task.init = function() {};

// Init config
grunt.initConfig({
  jshint: {
    all: ['index.js']
  }
});

// Register your own tasks
grunt.registerTask('mytask', function() {
  grunt.log.write('Ran my task.');
});

// Load tasks from npm
grunt.loadNpmTasks('grunt-contrib-jshint');

// Finally run the tasks, with options and a callback when we're done
grunt.tasks(['mytask', 'jshint'], {}, function() {
  grunt.log.ok('Done running tasks.');
});

Answer 2

You can get inspiration on how to run grunt from code by looking at grunt-cli which does this and which is a project maintained by the grunt folks.

Grunt is launched from code in grunt-cli/bin/grunt and you can read more about the options in grunt/lib/grunt/cli.js.

I use it in a private project like this:

var grunt = require("grunt");
grunt.cli({
  gruntfile: __dirname + "/path/to/someGruntfile.js",
  extra: {key: "value"}
});

The key "extra" will be available from inside the gruntfile as grunt.option("extra")

Here is a bloggpost that describes an alternative way to run a grunt task: http://andrewduthie.com/2014/01/14/running-grunt-tasks-without-grunt-cli/