AppSuite:GruntFAQ

FAQ regarding Grunt configuration for App Suite UI plugins

Building UI plugins

I get a 'local grunt not found' error message when running grunt

The local dependencies are not installed, run npm install to install them. After that, the error message should be gone. Note: npm install -g grunt is not enough.

Some of my files aren't copied. How can I extend a copy sub-task?

Especially when using external libraries managed with Bower or npm, sometimes the shared grunt configuration doesn't contain all cases for files to be copied during the build or dist tasks. Due to the extensibility of our shared grunt configuration, it's quite easy to add those missing files. You can hook up into the build_* or the dist_* copy task and add your custom configuration like this:

'use strict';

module.exports = function (grunt) {
    grunt.config.extend('copy', {
        build_custom: {
            files: [{
                expand: true,
                src: ['apps/**/*.in', 'apps/**/manifest.json'],
                dest: 'build/'
            }]
        }
    });
};

Put this in a file inside the grunt/tasks directory and you are done. From now on, all files ending with .in and all manifest.json files are put into the build/ directory using the same structure as in the apps/ directory. For more detailed information see the grunt documentation on files.

Using development proxy server

Which version of appserver am I using?

npm can be used to find out about the versions. npm ls appserver will list the version of appserver that is used.

I get an error message 'Port 8337 already in use by another process', what can I do?

Only one instance of appserver is allowed at a time (this might be subject to change, though). You have multiple options to start developing on that plugin. Number one:

1. Close all other running instances of appserver and run it exclusively in one project

Yes, that was the easy one. However, you might want to serve multiple projects at once. This case would need a little more configuration:

1. Choose one base UI project
2. Edit grunt/local.conf.json
3. add all build/ directories you want to serve to "prefixes" array
4. Run grunt connect watch in the base directory
5. In all other UI projects you want to develop, only run grunt watch without the connect task

Appserver will in this case do all the cache busting for you (it uses the timestamp of the "newest" directory in the prefix list) and if you didn't de-activate live-reload, it will work for all projects (the watch task sends livereload events to appserver, which will trigger the reload in the browser).