grunt-dir2strings

Flatten a folder to a JSON file represented by path strings

Often, your project will depend your files architecture.

This task combines all those path files into a single .json file. For example if you had a folder that looked like this...

patterns
|- templates
    |- homepage.mustache
    |- blog.mustache
|- pages
  |- homepage.mustache
  |- homepage-emergency.mustache
|- organisms
  |- section
    |- latest-posts.mustache
  |- global
    |- header.mustache
  |- article
    |- article-body.mustache
|- molecules
  |- text
    |- byline.mustache
|- atoms
  |- text
    |- headings.mustache
  |- global
    |- colors.mustache
    |- animations.mustache

...you would get JSON that looked something like this, except minified:

[
  "atoms",
  "atoms/global",
  "atoms/global/animations.mustache",
  "atoms/global/colors.mustache",
  "atoms/text",
  "atoms/text/headings.mustache",
  "molecules",
  "molecules/text",
  "molecules/text/byline.mustache",
  "organisms",
  "organisms/article",
  "organisms/article/article-body.mustache",
  "organisms/global",
  "organisms/global/header.mustache",
  "organisms/section",
  "organisms/section/latest-posts.mustache",
  "pages",
  "pages/homepage-emergency.mustache",
  "pages/homepage.mustache",
  "templates",
  "templates/blog.mustache",
  "templates/homepage.mustache"
]

The result array is alphabetically sorted and clean.

Getting Started

This plugin requires Grunt ~0.4.0

If you haven't used Grunt before, be sure to check out the Getting Started guide, as it explains how to create a Gruntfile as well as install and use Grunt plugins. Once you're familiar with that process, you may install this plugin with this command:

npm install grunt-dir2jstrings --save-dev

One the plugin has been installed, it may be enabled inside your Gruntfile with this line of JavaScript:

grunt.loadNpmTasks('grunt-dir2strings');

The "dir2strings" task

Overview

In your project's Gruntfile, add a section named dir2strings to the data object passed into grunt.initConfig().

grunt.initConfig({
  dir2strings: {
    options: {
      // Task-specific options go here.
    },
    data: {
      // Path for target and destination folders go here
    },
  },
})

Options

exclude

Type: String or Array

A pattern, or array of patterns, of filenames to exclude, e.g. **/*/notes.md. Uses the standard globbing syntax. .DS_Store and Thumbs.db files will always be excluded - you don't need to specify these.

Usage Examples

Default Options

This will read the contents of project/data and write a JSON file representing its contents to project/src/data.json:

grunt.initConfig({
  dir2strings: {
    data: {
      root: 'project/data',
      dest: 'project/src/data.json'
    },
  },
})

Custom Options

In this (slightly contrived) example, there are two targets - dev and dist. In both cases .md files will be excluded. In the dist target, any files named debug_hints.json will also be excluded.

grunt.initConfig({
  dir2strings: {
    options: {
      exclude: '**/*.md'
    },
    dev: {
      root: 'project/data',
      dest: 'project/src/data.json'
    },
    dist: {
      options: {
        exclude: '**/*/debug_hints.json'
      },
      root: 'project/data',
      dest: 'project/src/data.json'
    }
  },
})

Contributing

In lieu of a formal styleguide, take care to maintain the existing coding style. Add unit tests for any new or changed functionality. Lint and test your code using Grunt.

Release History

• 0.1.0 - first release
• 0.1.1 - update documentation