Running a Grunt Task directly from Node

Question

Running a Grunt Task directly from Node

How do I execute a Grunt task directly from Node without shelling out to the CLI?

I've got the following "POC" code; however, "stuff" is never logged.

var grunt = require('grunt');

grunt.registerTask('default', 'Log some stuff.', function() {
    console.log('stuff');
});

grunt.task.run('default'); // This is probably not the right command

I'm pretty new to Grunt, so I'm probably missing something obvious. I suspect the command I'm using to "run" the task is just queuing it, and doesn't actually start running things. I can't find documentation for manually running things, though.

javascript
node.js
gruntjs

Answer 1

Update

While this is the answer, Grunt has tons of issues with being run directly from Node. Not the least of which is when the grunt task fails, it calls process.exit and nicely quits your node instance. I cannot recommend trying to get this to work.

Ok, I'll just answer my own question. I was right, the command I had was wrong.

Updated code:

var grunt = require('grunt');

grunt.registerTask('default', 'Log some stuff.', function() {
    console.log('stuff');
});

grunt.tasks(['default']);

Answer 2

What if you do the following?

grunt.tasks("default");

I've created an Grunt runner in one of my projects that does some parsing and then call the line above. Almostly what you already answered, but with support for a Gruntfile.js.

Answer 3

We're using Jenkins for our builds. So here is how we resolved the issue using bash:

#!/bin/bash
export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/bin
grunt full-build | tee /dev/stderr | awk '/Aborted/ || /Fatal/{exit 1}'
echo rv: $?
exit $?

The use of /dev/stderr is because we're running within Jenkins and we still want to ouput to show up within the console.

Visualjeff