Creating Tasks in Grunt
Creating tasks in grunt is extremely simple. We need to give a name and a function to grunt.registerTask and then we are ready to execute those tasks. Tasks are useful when you need to perform it once in a given build. For example we write a hello tasks which will give us a log message about the time
grunt.registerTask('hello', function() {
console.log('\nGrunt executed at: ' + new Date() + '.\n');
})
To run the above tasks you need execute the command grunt hello and it will give the output as shown below.
The task object has the following properties :
name - task name
async - a function that notifies Grunt that this task is asynchronous and returns a callback.
requires - a function which takes task names and then ensures that they have previously run.
requiresConfig - it is an alias to the grunt.config.requires function.
nameArgs - task name including arguments used when running the task
args - an array of all arguments
flags - it is an object having key as args and value as true.
errorCount - Number of errors
options - a function used to retrieve the task's configuration options.
Example for using task object is
grunt.registerTask('hello', function() {
console.log('\nGrunt executed at: ' + new Date() + '.\n');
console.log('\nTask Name: ' + this.name);
console.log('\nTask Arguments: ' + this.args);
console.log('\nTask Total Error Count: ' + this.errorCount);
})
Task Aliasing
If you would have gone through the gruntfile.js from the previous post you would have seen the code like grunt.registerTask('default', ['jshint', 'qunit', 'concat', 'uglify']); which is nothing nut task aliasing. Here istead of providing a function to the grunt.registerTask we are providing an array of strings which will create a new task. The new task will sequentially run each of the tasks listed in the array. For example grunt.registerTask('default', ['jshint', 'qunit', 'concat', 'uglify']); will run jshint, qunit, concat and uglify in sequence.
Multitasking
Multitasks are like tasks however they accept multiple configurations. Grunt will use each property of a multitasks configuration as an individual configuration. This helps us in creating a single tasks and run it multiple times.
At first you need to add the specified configuration inside grunt.initconfig() as shown below.
multi: {
a : 1,
b : 'Hello',
}
Then you need to write a grunt.registerMultiTask on that config like below
grunt.registerMultiTask('multi', function() {
grunt.log.writeln(this.target + ' ' + this.data);
})
When you run grunt multi:a it will give the output as a 1 and when you run grunt multi:b it will give the output as b Hello.
Please Like and Share CodingDefined.com Blog, if you find it interesting and helpful.
No comments:
Post a Comment