grunt-simple-config

A faster, cleaner, less merge conflic grunt config

Getting Started

This plugin requires Grunt.

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-simple-config --save-dev

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

require('grunt-simple-config')(grunt, <options>);

Overview

The grunt-simple-config plugin was conceptualized when my projects began having large merge conflicts due to single line changes within the grunt config file. After much research, I was able to minimze the Gruntfile.js through the use of load-grunt-tasks and grunt.loadTasks but there was nothing to minimize my ever growing grunt.config object. Insert grunt-simple-config.

The grunt-simple-config plugin allows you to separate all of your grunt plugin configs into separate module files, and then load them through directory traversal.

Options

options.location

Description: Location of your grunt config directory Type: String Default value: ./grunt/config

options.filters

Description: Optional filters to ignore certain files using the minimatch library Type: String/Array Default value: ["*"]

options.hiddenFiles

Description: Flag to specify if hidden files should be allowed Type: Boolean Default value: false

Recommended Tree Structure

├── Gruntfile.js
├── LICENSE-MIT
├── grunt
│   └── config
│   │   └── cleanConfig.js
│   └── tasks
├── node_modules
├── package.json

Building your Config file

The only requirement of the config file is the naming convention. Since we are setting the config file to be the object index in our config, we will need to name the file the same as the require config object.

Given:

grunt.initConfig({
		cleanConfig: {
			options: {
				location: './grunt/config'
			}
		}
	});

we would need to place our cleanConfig file in ./grunt/config/cleanConfig.js and then rewrite our config into a module.

module.exports = {
	main: {
		options: {
			location: './grunt/config'
		}
	}
};

Sample Condenced Gruntfile.js

module.exports = function(grunt) {
	// Project configuration.
	grunt.initConfig({
		pkg: grunt.file.readJSON('package.json')
	});

	//load config
	require('grunt-simple-config')(grunt, {
		location: "./grunt/config"
	});

	//load npm tasks
	require('load-grunt-tasks')(grunt);

	// Load registered tasks/aliases
	grunt.loadTasks('./grunt/tasks');
};