How to run with mocha and node-inspector parallel with grunt tasks

Question

How to run with mocha and node-inspector parallel with grunt tasks

At the moment I am running tests with simple-mocha grunt task. I want to debug the code while running the tests. How would I do that with grunt?

    simplemocha: {
        options: {
            globals: ['expect'],
            timeout: 3000,
            ignoreLeaks: false,
            ui: 'bdd',
            reporter: 'tap'
        },
        all: {
            src: ['test/*.js']
        }
    },

node.js
gruntjs
mocha
node-inspector

Answer 1

I can think of two ways of achieving this. One is using this grunt task as a step of your own test-debug task (does exactly the same as your simplemocha task but runs grunt-debug first): https://github.com/burnnat/grunt-debug

You must enable the plugin by adding this to your Gruntfile:

grunt.loadNpmTasks('grunt-debug');

and then prepend debug before running your existing task, in console:

grunt debug simplemocha

Or, you could invoke nodejs --debug passing the main grunt script and arguments. A convenient way to do that in Linux bash would be nodejs --debug $(which grunt) simplemocha.