Grunt Rants

Crazy how hard it is to start projects from scratch, and pick the best modern technologies. Seems like always someone’s already made a bad choice I then have to deal with.

Grunt: automation

1. “So little time, so much to do!”, and stack gets ever more complex. So, don’t repeat yourself (DRY) — automate everything: minification, combining, running, reloading, testing, deploying…
2. Goals, specifically: run (local development), and deploy to Appfog.

NPM mess

Installing Grunt was painful! It had to do with migrating from 0.3 to 0.4.

1. $ grunt
   <FATAL> Unable to find "grunt.js" config file. Do you need any --help? </FATAL>

   $#@!
   Took some time to find I had an old Grunt (v0.3.17) installed globally, and in /usr/lib/node_modules/grunt/ instead of under /usr/local/lib/node_modules/ , so NPM refused to uninstall it:

   $ sudo npm uninstall -g grunt
   npm WARN uninstall not installed in /usr/local/lib/node_modules: "grunt"

   WTF? Nu, deleted it manually, including symlink in $PATH:

   $ sudo rm -r /usr/lib/node_modules/grunt/
   $ sudo rm /usr/bin/grunt

   Still, --version picks up an old one?!

   $ grunt --version
   grunt-cli v0.1.11
   grunt v0.3.17
   $ whereis grunt
   grunt: /usr/local/bin/grunt
   $ ll /usr/local/bin/grunt
   lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 39 Jan 7 11:50 /usr/local/bin/grunt -> ../lib/node_modules/grunt-cli/bin/grunt*

   Getting rid of grunt-cli, too:

   $ sudo npm uninstall -g grunt-cli
   unbuild grunt-cli@0.1.11

   Anyway, like BA says, prefer installing Grunt locally.

   $ npm install --save-dev grunt

   (dev or dep? If it’s global, does it go into package.json at all?)
   But, if local, won’t be symlinked somewhere in $PATH, and running it with

   $ ~/node_modules/grunt/bin/grunt

   is painful! Symlink it myself? Anyway, it bombs!

   $ ~/node_modules/grunt/bin/gruntpath.js:313
   throw new TypeError('Arguments to path.resolve must be strings');

   NPM installed it globally, but didn’t create a symlink?! WTF?

   $ grunt --version
   grunt: command not found

   *Not* a permissions problem — grunt.js isn’t executable! That’s what grunt-cli is for. This explains the wrapper function, too.
   Installed it globally, but gives an old version, again!? What a nightmare! And again…

   $ sudo npm uninstall -g grunt-cli
   unbuild grunt-cli@0.1.11
   $ grunt --version
   bash: /usr/local/bin/grunt: No such file or directory

2. Again, starting from scratch, this is how it works: grunt locally, grunt-cli globally:

   $ npm install --save-dev grunt
   grunt@0.4.2 node_modules/grunt
   $ npm install --global grunt-cli
   /usr/local/bin/grunt -> /usr/local/lib/node_modules/grunt-cli/bin/grunt
   grunt-cli@0.1.11 /usr/local/lib/node_modules/grunt-cli
   $ grunt --version
   grunt-cli v0.1.11
   grunt v0.4.2

   package.json now has:

   "devDependencies": {
   	"grunt": "~0.4.2"
   }

   Finally!

3. Reportedly, this grunt/grunt-cli separation will allow installing multiple versions of Grunt (locally), and still using the command line globally. Nu, except if they break it again.

Coffee

So much nicer!

Just run the app

1. $ npm start
   > foo@0.0.1 start ~/foo
   > node server.js
   Config initialized in development mode
   Initialize passport
   Express app started on port 3000

2. Ah, but thru nodemon to survive exceptions, and watch for changed files to keep developers (me!) happy. Or do I want to not run nodemon when in development mode? Which Grunt plugin? grunt-nodemon…

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