lazy-grunt-loading

Experimental utility to load grunt tasks lazily

The grunt workflow is to load all tasks for every invocation of grunt, then only run the ones the user actually wants. If you have a project with a ton of grunt tasks, or grunt tasks that take a long time to load, this could end up being painful. To address this pain, I've created a module that makes a few (potentially brittle) assumptions and hooks into grunt.task.run to only run the tasks you need.

Old way:

Gruntfile.js

module.exports = function(grunt) {

  // Both foo and bar will be loaded every time, even if you are not using all of them.
  grunt.loadTask('foo');
  grunt.loadTask('bar');

  grunt.initConfig() {
    foo: fooOpts,
    bar: barOpts
  }
};

New way:

Gruntfile.js

module.exports = function(grunt) {

  var lazyGruntLoading = require('lazy-grunt-loading');

      // A list of all files that could contain tasks you want to load. 
      // Getting this list is outside the scope of this module.
      // Ex: ['node_modules/foo/tasks/grunt-foo.js', 'tasks/file_name.js']
  var taskFiles = getTaskFiles(),
  
      // Optional: Not every grunt task is declared in a file of the same name. 
      // Pass an override here to get around this. This is not necessary if 
      // the only difference is the file having the 'grunt-' prefix - that
      // will get handled automatically. In this example, we see above that
      // taskFiles has 'tasks/file_name.js', which defines the 'bar' task,
      // so we add that override here.
      overrides = { file_name: 'bar'},
      
      // Optional: function to use for logging
      log = grunt.verbose.write;
  
  // Only the tasks you need will be loaded.
  lazyGruntLoading(grunt, taskFiles, overrides, log);

  // Config proceeds as it normally would.
  grunt.initConfig() {
    foo: fooOpts,
    bar: barOpts
  }
};

This could ultimately be a bad idea, but I'd like to experiment with it. Because parts of this are brittle, and getting the list of all files a task could be declared in is a burden, I don't recommend using this module unless your task load time is getting painful.