grunt-manifest-concat

Manifest based script concatenation. Inspired by Sprockets.

Getting Started

This plugin requires Grunt ^0.4.5.

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-manifest-concat --save-dev

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

grunt.loadNpmTasks('grunt-manifest-concat');

Usage

Setup

Add a section named manifest inside grunt.initConfig in your Gruntfile.

grunt.initConfig({
	manifest: {
		dist: {
			src: 'js',
			dest: 'build'
		}
	}
});

When this task is run It will search for *.json files inside the src directory, process those files and follow their directives to finally output the concatenated result to the dest directory.

Manifest Files

This is the basic structure of a manifest file:

{
  "contents": [
    { "require_tree": "vendor" },
    { "require_directory": "lib/modules" },
    "lib/main.js",
    "lib/debug.js"
  ]
}

The directives are defined inside the contents array, where the key is the directive type, and the value is the directive subject.

General Behaviour Notes

Paths

All paths are case sensitive and relative to the manifest file. It's possible to use absolute paths. URLs to remote resources are not supported.

Order

The order sprcified inside contents will be preserved, and while require_directory and require_tree take the files alphabethically It's possible to use mix the require if you need a specific file to be added first.

{
  "contents": [
    "lib/modules/helpers.js",
    { "require_directory": "lib/modules/models" },
    { "require_tree": "lib/modules" }
  ]
}

Content Duplication

It was decided not to implement the include directive as grunt-contrib-concat tasks will get rid of any duplicated files and keep each file once, the first time they appear.

Clashing Manifest Names

It's recommended to have unique names for manifests as they can overwrite each other during the output process.

Options

Options can be set inside the task definition on the Gruntfile or can be added directly to the manifest files, for more granular control.

sourceMap

Type: Boolean Default: false

Tells grunt-contrib-concat tasks to generate the sourceMap.

banner

Type: Boolean Default: false

Tells grunt-contrib-concat tasks to include a banner. The banner cannot be customized and includes the name of the manifest as a single line comment.

// Manifest: js/vendor.json

extension

Type: String Default: "js"

The extension dictates what type of files are found by the require_directory and required_tree directives and will also be used to construct the result file for each manifest <manifest name>.<extension>.

cwd

Type: String Default: ""

Gives the option of setting a shared base path for all contents. Only some directives can take advantage of this feature.

dest

Type: String Default: Read from Gruntfile

It's possible to override the dest value for each individual manifest file by using this option. It can be a directory or a file with an extension matching the extension option.

Available Directives

require

Subject: File (cwd aware)

Inserts the contents of a file. If a file is required multiple times It will only appear once. It can be specified either by using a string that contains the path or by providing an object:

{
  "options": {
    "cwd": "vendor"
  },
  "contents": [
    "jquery.min.js",
    { "require": "jquery.history.js" }
  ]
}

require_directory

Subject: Directory

Inserts the contents of all files inside the given path. Files are matched based by extension and are required in alphabethical order.

{
  "contents": [
    { "require_directory": "vendor/modules" }
  ]
}

require_tree

Subject: Directory

Works like require_directory but It recursively search for files inside the given path.

{
  "contents": [
    { "require_tree": "vendor" }
  ]
}